MACOMÈRE (THE JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITERS & SCHOLARS)
SPECIAL ISSUE: 2012
DIONNE BRAND

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.

We 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
*   the meaning of witness

We are seeking longer scholarly articles (approximately 5000 words) and book reviews of Brand’s work (1000-1500 words).

Submission process:

If you are interested in making a submission to this special issue, please send a 300 word abstract to the Guest Editors, Rinaldo Walcott, OISE, University of Toronto (rinaldo.walcott@utoronto.ca<mailto:da.trotz@utoronto.ca>), Leslie Sanders, York University (leslie@yorku.ca), and Heather Smyth, University of Waterloo (hsmyth@uwaterloo.ca<mailto:hsmyth@uwaterloo.ca>). The due date for abstracts is August 1, 2011. After review of the abstracts, selected potential contributors will be invited to submit their full papers for peer 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 (http://www.macomerejournal.com<http://www.macomerejournal.com/>).