Call for Papers: MaComère, Special Issue on Dionne Brand
The guest editors of MaComère (The Journal of the Association of Caribbean Woman Writers and Scholars)—Leslie Sanders (York University), Heather Smyth (University of Waterloo), and Rinaldo Walcott (University of Toronto)—are calling for papers for a special issue on Dionne Brand. The due date for abstracts is August 1, 2011.
Description: This special issue of MaComère is focused on Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand. For over thirty years, Dionne Brand has been testing the capacity of poetic language to address ethical questions of global consequence. She has published in a wide range of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and non fiction, and documentary film, and is Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto (2009-2012). Brand has won many awards for her writing, including most recently the prestigious 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize for her narrative poem Ossuaries [see previous post Dionne Brand gets the Griffin]. The editors invite essays on any topic in relation to her work, and particularly welcome explorations of Brand’s poetics and literary form, and the ways her work engages conversations with other writers in the Caribbean and Canada, including her literary influences.
Some examples of possible themes include: her relationships with the Caribbean and Canada; place, space, nation, and diaspora; the trajectory of her literary and political evolution; questions of voice and audience; her poetic understanding of contemporary culture; the place of music in her work, especially jazz; representations of gender and sexuality ethics and the possibility of politics; and the meaning of witness; among others.
If you are interested in making a submission of a scholarly article (approximately 5000 words) or book review of Brand’s work (1000-1500 words), please send a 300 word abstract to the Guest Editors, Rinaldo Walcott, OISE, University of Toronto (rinaldo.walcott@utoronto.ca), Leslie Sanders, York University (leslie@yorku.ca), and Heather Smyth, University of Waterloo (hsmyth@uwaterloo.ca) by August 1, 2011, for review.
MaComère is a refereed journal that is devoted to scholarly studies and creative works by and about Caribbean Women in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Diaspora. It is the journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, an organization founded in 1995.
For more information on MaComère, see http://www.macomerejournal.com/
For more on Dionne Brand, see http://www.toronto.ca/culture/poet_laureate.htm