Dumont’s lecture is Thursday, October 23 from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus.
Renowned poet Marilyn Dumont is Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet for 2025-26.
Dumont’s lecture is October 23 from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. It is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar and book signing in Room 211.
Dumont’s talk on October 23, “Necessary Weapons: Memory, Family, and Linguistic Survival,” will take the form of a braided memoir of a Cree/English bilingual home with reflections on language, social currency, power and resistance.
Renowned playwright and former VIU professor Dr. Laura Cranmer will introduce Dumont at the Distinguished Poet’s Lecture. Reflecting on the impact of Dumont’s poetry, she said: “In the Arts One First Nations program, Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl was required reading as a counter narrative to the settler literary construction of Indigenous women, and her work continues to illuminate the complexities of our shared colonial history.”
Dumont will also perform two poetry readings. There will be a reading and Q&A for students on October 22 from 11:30 am to 1 pm in Building 310, The Malaspina Theatre lobby. There will be community reading that night (October 22) on campus at Shq’apthut (The Gathering Place, Building 170) from 7:30 to 9 pm. Student poet Susan Garcia will open for Dumont and there will be music.
Poet and English and Creative Writing Professor Dr. Sonnet L’Abbe also celebrates the power of Dumont’s work: “I myself was a brown girl when A Really Good Brown Girl first came out and I remember the profoundly supportive impact it had on me even to hear that someone had titled their book that way. Marilyn Dumont was ahead of her time in bringing her strong Métis voice to Canadian literary circles. Any writer who has since aimed to voice an experience of resistance and resilience under colonial oppression has had Dumont's powerful example to look up to.”
English professor Dr. Mike Roberson hails the depth of Dumont’s poetry: “Marilyn Dumont’s poems do the work of a canoe paddle – reaching beyond the surface, slapping with an open face, cutting with a gentle edge, recovering with each new stroke of the pen.”
Copies of Dumont’s books and a series of limited-edition Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture chapbooks will be available at the VIU bookstore and at the reception. The Gustafson Distinguished Poetry Chair was established in 1998 from the estate of the late, preeminent Canadian poet Ralph Gustafson and his wife Betty. For more information, please email Dr. Neil Surkan, Chair of the Gustafson Committee (Joy Gugeler, Sonnet L’Abbe, Mike Roberson) at Neil.Surkan@viu.ca.
Marilyn Dumont bio
Marilyn Dumont is a celebrated poet of Métis ancestry. Her first collection of poetry, A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. It continues to be read and course-adopted across Canada and in the US. The Pemmican Eaters (2015) won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her most recent book is South Side of a Kinless River (Brick Books, 2024). She has been the writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities and the Edmonton Public Library as well as an advisor in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers Program at the Banff Centre. She is a full professor of Indigenous Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Related Posts
