Marilyn Dumont

Poet and writer Marilyn Dumont earned her BA from the University of Alberta and MFA from the University of British Columbia. She is of Cree and 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. Other collections include green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007), winner of the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year; and The Pemmican Eaters (2015), which won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award.

Dumont’s poetry explores how the structural legacies of Canada’s racist and colonial history continue to be lived realities for First Nations and Métis communities. In an interview with Room magazine, Dumont says, “Writing has saved my emotional, spiritual, and intellectual life in a country where I wasn’t supposed to exist, let alone thrive. It allows me to sort out the mess of structural inequity, bureaucratic obfuscation, colonial racism, and sexism. It allows a space for my voice and sense of self.”

Dumont has taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts and served as a mentor in its Aboriginal Emerging Writers program. A former writer-in-residence at the Edmonton Public Library and numerous Canadian universities, she serves on the board of the Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada. She is an associate professor in the Arts and Native Studies Program at the University of Alberta.