The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this … coloniality constructs outsides and insides — worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated — in order to live something like a real self. Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness. (From The University of Alberta Press)

Dionne ​Brand is an award-winning poet and novelist. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and the Trillium Book Award for her 1997 collection Land to Light On. She won the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize for Ossuaries. Her other books include the poetry works thirsty, The Blue Clerk and the novel What We All Long For. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada.

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is available in March 2020.