Dionne Brand to head new publishing imprint at Knopf Canada
Tabassum Siddiqui | | Posted: June 6, 2022 12:56 PM | Last Updated: June 6, 2022
Brand will serve as editorial director of Alchemy, which will publish fiction and nonfiction titles
Publishing house Knopf Canada is launching Alchemy, a new publishing program headed by acclaimed Toronto poet, novelist and essayist Dionne Brand.
As editorial director of Alchemy, Brand will work with Knopf Canada publishing director Lynn Henry and publisher Martha Kanya-Forstner to develop a new line of books that decenter colonial models of literature.
"We will publish thoughtful works that attend, both narratively and gesturally, to the idea that we all live/lived these colonial processes," Brand told CBC Books by email.
"And were we to take that for granted instead of burying that knowledge, how would we speak of the world? What would it allow us to see, and so write, in the world? So we aren't looking for subjects so much as sensibility. And we are deeply interested in playing with form and in invention."
Brand says she and her Knopf colleagues have already begun soliciting work for the new imprint, and are seeking proposals for fiction and nonfiction that explore contemporary ideas and imagine a radical vision for the future.
Alchemy plans to release two to three titles each year, and will also be presenting The Alchemy Lectures in partnership with York University, spearheaded by the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities.
The lecture will bring together three to four artists, scholars, writers, architects and other makers from Canada and around the world to discuss timely social and political issues. The event will culminate in the publication of a book that builds on the themes arising from the annual public lecture.
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Brand recalled that the idea for the lecture series began during a lunch she had in Toronto with Henry, Kanya-Forstner and Dr. Christina Sharpe, the current Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.
"We were talking about all the possibilities for Alchemy by Knopf and the word itself — 'alchemy' — suggested a format of collaborative thought," Brand said. "We're interested in breaking disciplines, showing their relation."
Henry noted that the imprint itself was born out of a casual conversation she and Brand had during a walk. "It is this spirit of continual exchange of ideas and experience, and what arises out of reframing and reimagining what we think we know, that gives such life and energy to this project," she said in a news release.
Brand, one of Canada's most celebrated writers for her contribution to Canadian literature over the past four decades, is a member of the Order of Canada and has won numerous awards, including the 2011 Giller Prize for her long poem Ossuaries, the 2006 Toronto Book Award for the novel What We All Long For, and the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry for the collection Land to Light On.
The Trinidad-born Canadian writer is the former poet laureate of Toronto and was previously the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart from 2014 to 2021.
"It was a joy to be poetry editor at M&S," Brand said. "And it will be an equal pleasure to work now in fiction and nonfiction, and to have the larger project within the publishing company of shaping a line of books, a line of thinking, a line of conversation."
Alchemy aims to announce its first titles in the coming months, with the first lecture scheduled to take place in November 2022 and the accompanying book planned for fall 2023.
Literary works have always intervened in the world. They are very powerful objects, even when they present as benign.
Brand, who has a book of her own — Nomenclature, a collection of poems spanning four decades — due out this August, said she hopes the work published by Alchemy will offer unique ways of looking at many of the pressing issues of our time.
"I think that literary works have always intervened in the world," she said. "They are very powerful objects, even when they present as benign. And so literary works matter to our present as much as environmentalist work, as much as public-health work, as much as journalism — I could go on."
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