Dionne Brand Wins 2019 Trillium Book Award
July 3, 2019
A huge congratulations to Dionne Brand for winning Ontario’s Trillium Book Award! Her book The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart) was named the best English-language title in the province.
In The Blue Clerk, award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet’s pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Keipja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges.
—from Penguin Random House Canada
The Blue Clerk was also a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. As well, it was on the longlist for The League of Canadian Poets’ 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand’s poetry collection Land to Light On also won the Trillium Book Award in 1998.
We are proud to congratulate Brand on this honour, and we invite you to visit Canadian Literature’s articles on and book reviews of her work:
Articles
- “It is life you must write about”: Fixity and Refraction in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
by Sharlee Cranston-Reimer
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 93-109 - Spaces of Agency: Installation Art in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Veronica Austen
Published in Agency & Affect. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 223 (Winter 2014): 67-83 - Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries: Songs of Necropolitics
by Anne Quéma
Published in Recursive Time. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 222 (Autumn 2014): 52-68 - Roughing It in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black Diaspora
by Andrea Medovarski
Published in Tracking CanLit. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 220 (Spring 2014): 94-114 - Soccer and the City: The Unwieldy National in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Michael Buma
Published in Sport and the Athletic Body. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 202 (Autumn 2009): 12-27 - Affective Coordination and Avenging Grace: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here
by John Corr
Published in Disappearance and Mobility. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 201 (Summer 2009): 113-129 - “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective”: Public Space and Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Emily Johansen
Published in Diasporic Women’s Writing. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 196 (Spring 2008): 48-62 - Wondering into Country: Dionne Brand’s A Map of the Door of No Return
by Maia Joseph
Published in Canada Reads. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 193 (Summer 2007): 75-92 - Picking the Deadlock of Legitimacy: Dionne Brand’s “noise like the world cracking”
by Ellen Quigley
Published in Women & the Politics of Memory. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 186 (Autumn 2005): 48-67 - Dionne Brand’s Winter Epigrams
by Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Published in Poets & Politics. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 105 (Summer 1985): 18-30
Book Reviews
- Theory reviewed in Love under Capitalism by Natalee Caple
- The Blue Clerk reviewed in Postnational Argonauts by Gregory Betts
- At the Full and Change of the Moon reviewed in Uses of Cultural Memory by Maureen Moynagh
- The Journey Prize Stories 19: The Best of Canada’s New Writers by Caroline Adderson, David Bezmozgis and Dionne Brand reviewed in New Short Fiction by Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
- What We All Long For reviewed in Soul Survivors by Evelyn C. White
- Inventory reviewed in Poems of Witness by Hilary Clark
- Land to Light on reviewed in Still Need the Revolution by Susan Gingell
- “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up”: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History by Dionne Brand et al. reviewed in Others’ Histories by Donna Palmateer Pennee
- Thirsty reviewed in Orbiting Toronto by Heather Smyth
- Bread out of Stone reviewed in Making Bread out of Stone by Guy Beauregard
- Chronicles: Early Works reviewed in Black Chronicles by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
See also CanLit Guides chapters on Dionne Brand’s works
- Dionne Brand: No Language Is Neutral
by Carl Watts - Diaspora Studies and Canadian Literature
by L. Camille van der Marel - What We All Long For by Dionne Brand
(Case Study)
2019 Scholarly and Research Communication Journal Innovation Award
June 7, 2019
We have some great news to share! Canadian Literature has been awarded the 2019 Scholarly and Research Communication Journal Innovation Award for the CanLit Guides project, more specifically for the 2018 Collection of chapters. The award intends to recognize “new Canadian scholarly journal communication initiatives that are designed to increase the influence of a journal among readers and are noted by peers as significant. More generally, the award is intended to underline the creative and innovative contributions that scholarly journals make to effective and inspired scholarly communication.”
The CanLit Guides 2018 Collection was edited by Kathryn Grafton, Ceilidh Hart, Laura Moss, and Shannon Smyrl. Congratulations to the editors, the contributors, and the journal staff who worked together to make the innovations happen. The authors of the 2018 Collection include:
- Sarah Banting
- Shelley Boyd
- Nathalie Cooke
- Nadine Fladd
- Brenna Clarke Gray
- Ceilidh Hart
- Tiffany Johnstone
- Christine Kim
- Lucia Lorenzi
- Bronwyn Malloy
- Sophie McCall
- Brendan McCormack
- Farah Moosa
- Gillian Roberts
- Shannon Smyrl
- L. Camille van der Marel
- Carl Watts
We were presented the award at the Canadian Association of Learned Journals AGM at Congress held at the University of British Columbia this past weekend. It is a wonderful way to celebrate the anniversary of the launch of the new chapters one year ago at Congress 2018. For more information about the award, kindly visit https://www.calj-acrs.ca/news/src-innovation-award.
Winner of Canadian Literature’s 60th Anniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize
June 4, 2019
Congratulations Christina Turner!
Canadian Literature is pleased to announce the winner of the 60th Anniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize, awarded as part of the journal’s anniversary celebrations taking place during Congress 2019 at UBC. The winner is Christina Turner for her article “Atlantic Cosmopolitanism in John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright” published in the Emerging Scholars special issue of Canadian Literature (no. 226, Autumn 2015, pp. 55-72). The prize is awarded to the best essay by an author who was a graduate student at the time of publication among the most recent sixty articles appearing in Canadian Literature—a corpus that includes two special issues on the work of emerging scholars.
Our thanks to past editors W. H. New, Laurie Ricou, and Margery Fee who served as the selection committee for the prize. The committee praised Christina Turner’s article for the quality of writing and the quality of organization. They note that Turner establishes her thesis early and allows the argument to unfold clearly, drawing as necessary on Steffler’s text, on Cartwright’s journal, and on existing research. The committee in particular applauded the way she reads the novel both for the implications of its formal strategies and in the context of international economic history.
The prize was established on the occasion of the journal’s anniversary to simultaneously reflect on the journal’s history and celebrate the future of the field. We also want to signal Canadian Literature’s continuing commitment to recognizing the significant contribution graduate student scholarship is making to the discourse of the journal and the field of Canadian literature.
Congratulations also to the wonderful shortlisted authors:
Dallas Hunt
“Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler-Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral History”
Published in Indigenous Literature and the Arts of Community. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 230-231 (Autumn/Winter 2016): 25-42.
Rebekah Ludolph
“Humour, Intersubjectivity, and Indigenous Female Intellectual Tradition in Anahareo’s Devil in Deerskins”
Published in Literary History. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 233 (Summer 2017): 109-126.
Shane Neilson
“Claire’s Head and Pain: Beyond the Sign of the Weapon”
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 73-90.
Kate Siklosi
“‘the absolute / of water’”: The Submarine Poetic of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!”
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 111-130.
Call for Papers Deadline Extension: “Decolonial (Re)visions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror”
May 23, 2019
Deadline extended to July 1, 2019 from May 15, 2019.
Special Issue: “Decolonial (Re)visions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror”
Whether in outer space, an alternate universe, a haunted house, or a mythic time, the worlds built in genre fiction re-present and transform the colonial conditions of our shared and still incommensurable world. We seek contributions on Black Canadian and Indigenous work in the genres of SF, fantasy and horror. How, for example, do Black and Indigenous writers respond to the different positions colonialism historically imposed on those who were subjected to alien abduction versus alien invasion? How might genre fiction address relations with other racialized immigrant peoples? Possible themes: diaspora, critical utopias, futurity, haunting, Enlightenment critique, racial science.
Special issue editors: Lou Cornum, Suzette Mayr, and Maureen Moynagh
Submissions should be uploaded to Canadian Literature‘s online submissions system OJS by the deadline of May 15, 2019. Questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit(at)ubc.ca.
For more details about the special issue, visit our Calls for Papers page.
New Issue: House, Home, Hospitality #237
May 9, 2019
We are pleased to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature Issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality! Brendan McCormack’s editorial reflects on notions of house, home, and hospitality in this issue and over the journal’s history as we prepare to host celebrations of Canadian Literature’s sixtieth anniversary at Congress 2019. He writes:
Which brings me back home, to the house this journal’s pages started building six decades ago. How has the house become a home? How does Canadian Literature enact hospitality? Whom does it welcome as visitors? What conversations can it still productively host? How might it become a better guest? Where is its welcome worn, and when is it time to step away and listen? On one hand, these are practical questions of feasibility in a rapidly changing publishing landscape, particularly as the move to open access shifts the foundations of traditional publishing models. Like other journals, we are deeply invested in welcoming more visitors and subscribers, and in making the journal the kind of accommodating space that all sorts of scholars see as a valuable home for their work. On the other hand, these are ideological questions of responsibility for a journal such as this, whose creation in 1959 not only reflected the cultural nationalist climate that made its title possible, but helped support the institutional framework of a cultural formation, “CanLit,” that now appears so inhospitable, so unhomely, and for many always has been. . . . At this moment when CanLit is at once uninhabitable and ripe for rebuilding, it is incumbent upon its institutions—including its journals—to reimagine their hospitality and social relations.
—Brendan McCormack, “Be Our Guest”
This issue also features:
- Articles by Deanna Reder and Alix Shield, Aubrey Jean Hanson, Alec Follett, Jane Boyes, James Hahn, and Julie Cairnie.
- Poetry by Pauline Peters, Hendrik Slegtenhorst, Sabyasachi Nag, Michael Penny, George Elliott Clarke, Tas Elizabeth Beck, Jessica Brown, and Dawn Macdonald.
- Reviews by Angie Abdou, Alex Assaly, Paul Barrett, Guy Beauregard, Will Best, Magali Blanc, Natalie Boldt, Alexandra Bournelis, Marie-Eve Bradette, Nicholas Bradley, Olivia Burgess, Tim Conley, Joel Deshaye, Margery Fee, Shoshannah Ganz, James Gifford, Aubrey Jean Hanson, Evangeline Holtz, Brenda Johnston, Jan Lermitte, Denyse Lynde, Tanis MacDonald, Gabrielle Mills, Shane Neilson, Claire Omhovère, Kait Pinder, Eric Schmaltz, Monica Sousa, Dale Tracy, Véronique Trottier, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Sylvie Vranckx, Emily Wall, Chuan Xu, and Matthew Zantingh.
- Opinions and Notes by Sharanpal Ruprai and Sheniz Janmohamed, and Shazia Hafiz Ramji.
The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!
Wayson Choy (1939-2019)
May 8, 2019
The staff at Canadian Literature pay tribute to the memory of Wayson Choy who died on Saturday, April 27th, 2019. He was featured in an early interview in a special issue of Canadian Literature on Asian Canadian Writing (issue 163, Winter 1999), but his history at UBC dates back to his time as a student in the early 1960s. Known as “Sonny Choy” by the other aspiring writers in the English classes at UBC in these formative years, (his class peers included Fred Wah, George Bowering, and Frank Davey), he was mentored by Earle Birney, Jan de Bruyn, and Jacob Zilber. His short story, “The Sound of Waves,” was published in Prism (a journal edited by de Bruyn and Zilber), and in The Best American Short Stories (1962). After several years of teaching at Humber College, Toronto, Choy took a sabbatical leave after the death of his mother in 1977: he returned to UBC and completed a creative writing seminar with Carol Shields. She prompted him to write a story with a randomly selected slip of pink paper. The resulting work, symbolically focused on a pink jade amulet shaped like a peony, provided the core motif that would eventually evolve into the popular novel The Jade Peony (1995). The Jade Peony was a co-winner of the 1995 Trillium Award in Ontario and the 1996 Vancouver Book Award. Other books that explore the intricate patterns of family history followed in the wake of this success: his Vancouver memoir Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999) won the Edna Staebler Award for non-fiction; the sequel to The Jade Peony, All That Matters (2004), was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won a Trillium Award; in 2009, he published another memoir that directly grappled with his own mortality and the special network of family support that was vital to his survival of a coma and heart attack, Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying. In 2015, Wayson Choy received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. A man of deep compassion and generous in sharing his advice, support, and wit with fellow writers and loyal readers, he will be deeply missed.
—Glenn Deer, Associate Editor
Links to articles and reviews of Wayson Choy’s works in Canadian Literature
By Glenn Deer
Published in Asian Canadian Studies Spec issue of Canadian Literature 199 (Winter 2008): 118-144
By Christopher Lee
Published in Asian Canadian Writing. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 163 (Winter 1999): 18-33
By and
Published in Asian Canadian Writing. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 163 (Winter 1999): 34-44
By Reviewed in In-Between Souls by Published in Asian Canadian Writing. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 163 (Winter 1999): 179-180
By Reviewed in Myths of History by Published in Canadian Literature 154 (Autumn 1997): 162-164
See also the CanLit Guides chapter on The Jade Peony
canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/the-jade-peony-by-wayson-choy/
A Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Canadian Literature
March 21, 2019
Founded in 1959, Canadian Literature was the first quarterly journal devoted solely to the critical discussion of Canadian writers and writing. Since then, we’ve published thousands of articles, book reviews, and poetry in 236 issues. The journal is now read in 180 countries every year and has contributors from around the world as well. For the past sixty years, we’ve ranked as the leading journal in the field of Canadian literary studies.
With Congress 2019 being hosted at the University of British Columbia, it is the perfect opportunity to recognize the journal’s 60th anniversary. Join us in celebration of this important milestone with a public reading by innovative poets who are shaping the literary landscape in Vancouver and beyond.
Emceed by our poetry editor, Phinder Dulai, the reading will include Jordan Abel, Sonnet L’Abbé, Daphne Marlatt, Cecily Nicholson, and Shazia Hafiz Ramji.
A reception will follow with refreshments and a short program that honours the history of the journal, its contributors, and its creators. The 60th Anniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize will also be awarded.
The poetry reading and reception are free and open to the public. Doors open at 5 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.
When
June 1, 2019
Where
Green College
6201-6205 Cecil Green Park Road
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Program
5:00 PM
Doors open
5:30–6:45 PM
Poetry Reading (Green College Coach House)
7:00–8:30 PM
Reception (Green College Piano Lounge)
Visit our Facebook Event page at bit.ly/CL60th
Shortlist for Canadian Literature’s 60th Anniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize
February 14, 2019
Canadian Literature is pleased to announce the shortlist of finalists for our 60th Anniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize, to be awarded as part of the journal’s anniversary celebrations taking place during Congress 2019 at UBC. The prize will be given to the best essay by an author who was a graduate student at the time of publication among the most recent 60 articles appearing in Canadian Literature—a corpus that includes two special issues on the work of emerging scholars. The prize has been established on the occasion of our anniversary to celebrate the future as we reflect on the journal’s history, and to signal Canadian Literature’s continuing commitment to supporting the work of graduate students. We hope in this way to recognize the significant contribution graduate student scholarship is making to the discourse of the journal and the field of Canadian literature.
Shortlist
Dallas Hunt
“Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler-Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral History”
Published in Indigenous Literature and the Arts of Comunity. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 230-231 (Autumn/Winter 2016): 25-42.
Rebekah Ludolph
“Humour, Intersubjectivity, and Indigenous Female Intellectual Tradition in Anahareo’s Devil in Deerskins”
Published in Literary History. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 233 (Summer 2017): 109-126.
Shane Neilson
“Claire’s Head and Pain: Beyond the Sign of the Weapon”
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 73-90.
Kate Siklosi
“the absolute / of water”: The Submarine Poetic of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 111-130.
Christina Turner
“Atlantic Cosmopolitanism in John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright”
Published in Emerging Scholars. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 226 (Autumn 2015): 55-72.
The winner will receive $500 and a subscription to the journal. A jury composed of former Canadian Literature editors W. H. New, Laurie Ricou, and Margery Fee will adjudicate the shortlist to select the winner. The prize will be presented at Canadian Literature’s 60th Anniversary reception to be held on Saturday, June 1, 7:00–8:30pm, at Green College, UBC.
ACQL Barbara Godard Prize 2018 Winner – Emily Bednarz
February 7, 2019
Canadian Literature is pleased to announce the publication of Emily Bednarz’s prize-winning essay “Assembling Urban Archives: Reading Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now.” Emily is the 2017-2018 winner of the ACQL Barbara Godard Prize for Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar, a prize presented annually at the ACQL conference. Emily’s article is now available on our website. In it, she writes:
Given its malleable urban geography—its fluctuating sub/urban character witnessed over centuries of industrial development—the city of Vancouver is a place haunted by previous iterations of itself. Many Canadian poets over the past century have observed the city’s changing geographic, architectural, and industrial dynamics. This is perhaps most notable in Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver collections, beginning with Vancouver Poems (1972) and on to the expanded and modified Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013). While Marlatt’s texts, forty years apart, are thematically concerned with the way in which historical events shape the contours of urban space decades (even centuries) after they occur, Liquidities also echoes back to, or is haunted by, its first edition. Here I will not only trace Marlatt’s depiction of historical hauntings in urban space but I will also compare the editions of the texts as representative of such urban hauntings.
—Emily Bednarz, “Assembling Urban Archives: Reading Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now”
New Issue: Lost and Found #236
January 29, 2019
We are pleased to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature Issue 236, Lost and Found! Laura Moss’ editorial this issue is an advice column on how to increase your chances of publication in an academic journal. She writes:
As the editor of a journal, I’m often asked how people can increase their article’s chances of publication. Having served as editor (and acting editor) for five years now, I’ve read over a thousand readers’ reports and written many hundred decision letters. Over the course of adjudication of submissions, I’ve noticed patterns of omission and problem areas that are consistently noted across reports. I have learned what peers read for and where critical emphasis often lies in peer review. I also know that most academics occupy the double role of being both writers and evaluators. So, when I conceived of the idea for this editorial, I thought it would be useful to reach beyond my own observations and to consult my academic community. On Facebook, I asked my colleagues across fields for “useful tips/editorial feedback that you’ve been given or that you have given to others.” They, in turn, offered their advice (thus all the people quoted below shared their comments in that social media venue. I am grateful to all). Interestingly, almost all the comments were ones I have seen before in peer review readers’ reports. Such crowdsourcing loosely illustrates that while sub-fields may vary, what readers seem to value as publishable scholarship often shares certain features.
—Laura Moss, “An Editor’s Advice: How to Increase Your Chances of Publication in an Academic Journal”
This issue also features:
- Articles by Jennifer Harris, Emma Cleary, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andre Furlani, and Heather Macfarlane.
- Poetry by Gillian Wallace, Lydia Kwa, A. F. Moritz, Franco Cortese, Angeline Schellenberg, and Sara Mang.
- Reviews by Gisèle M. Baxter, Liza Bolen, François-Emmanuël Boucher, Stephen Cain, MLA Chernoff, Hilary Clark, Ryan J. Cox, Heidi Tiedemann Darroch, Susie DeCoste, Paul Denham, Greg Doran, Scott Duchesne, Stephen Dunning, Jeff Fedoruk, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Lydia Forssander-Song, Alexandre Gauthier, Jennifer Henderson, Suzanne James, Kyle Kinaschuk, Sarah-Jean Krahn, Zoë Landale, Dorothy F. Lane, Christine Lorre-Johnston, Shao-Pin Luo, Sarah MacKenzie, Krzysztof Majer, Linda Morra, Marcia Nardi, Tracy O’Brien, Claire Omhovère, Jane Elizabeth Parker, Olivia Pellegrino, Ryan Porter, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Jason Rotstein, Ralph Sarkonak, Neil Surkan, Cheryl Suzack, Yusuf Varachia, Carl Watts, and Lorraine York.
- Opinions and Notes by Joseph Pivato and Robert Thacker.
The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!