Award-winning writer Marilyn Dumont will be speaking at the En’owkin Centre on April 2 as part of the 2013 Literary Reading Series.
Dumont’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. The collection is now in its 13th printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized in secondary and post-secondary literary texts.
Dumont’s second collection, Green Girl Dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer’s Guild of Alberta. Her third collection, That Tongued Belonging, was awarded the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.
Dumont has been the writer-in-residence at the Edmonton Public Library, the Universities of Alberta, Brandon, Grant MacEwan, Toronto-Massey College and Windsor. She has been faculty at the Banff Centre in programs such as Writing with Style and Wired Writing and has advised and mentored in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers’ Program. In 2009, Dumont published her first novella, Stray Dog Moccasins. She serves as a board member on the Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada and teaches Creative Writing for Athabasca University while working on her fourth poetry manuscript in which she explores Métis history, politics and identity through the life and times of her ancestor, Gabriel Dumont; Louis Riel’s general.
Dumont has read internationally in Belgium, Scotland and New Zealand as part of the Honouring Words Celebration of indigenous writing by Canadian aboriginal, Maori and Australian Aborigine authors and storytellers. The writer has also done editing work with Theytus Books on Initiations: A Selection of Young Native Writings. Theytus Books is located on the Penticton Indian Reserve and is First Nations owned and operated in partnership with the En’owkin Centre. It is the oldest indigenous publishing house in Canada.
Dumont is appearing at the En’owkin Centre on Green Mountain Road on April 2. Doors will open at 11:30 a.m. with a welcome address at noon by Jeannette Armstrong, director of the En’owkin Centre and Gerry William of the En’owkin Creative Writing department. A reading will take place at 12:15 p.m. followed by a book signing at 1:15 p.m.
