Marilyn Dumont

Marilyn Dumont is of Cree/Métis ancestry. Since 1985, Marilyn has been published in numerous Canadian literary journals, and her work has been widely anthologized as well as broadcast on radio and television. Her first collection won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets, for the best first collection of poetry that year by a Canadian writer. Her second collection won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer’s Guild of Alberta. Marilyn has taught at Simon Fraser University and Kwantlen University-College in Vancouver and at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She has also worked in video production as an intern with the National Film Board.

Marilyn earned a B.A. in English from the University of Alberta, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Alberta, Windsor, Toronto and Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton. She teaches English and Creative Writing and is working on a project about her family’s connection to Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel’s General. This project may develop into any one or a combination of poetry collection, non-fiction memoir and/or documentary film.

Marilyn has read internationally in Belgium, Scotland and most recently in New Zealand as part of the Honouring Words Celebration of indigenous writing by Canadian aboriginal, Maori and Australian Aborigine authors and storytellers.

In reviewing Marilyn’s first collection Canadian poet, Susan Musgrave, writes "As well as such fiercely defiant poems, Dumont writes with lyrical tenderness about friends, family and the prairie landscape..." While another Canadian poet, Judith Fitzgerald, declares: "Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl immediately turns readers into willing captors witnessing a preternaturally gifted artist in possession of a world-class bag of poetic tricks."

• Bibliography of Works by and about Marilyn Dumont