Celebrated Poet Marilyn Dumont to Read at VIU October 22nd and 23rd, 2025
Renowned poet Marilyn Dumont will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture on October 23rd from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. It is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar, and book signing in Room 211.
Dumont’s talk is titled "Necessary Weapons: Memory, Family, and Linguistic Survival," a braided memoir of a Cree/English bilingual home with reflections on language, social currency, power, and resistance.
Dumont will also present a reading followed by a Q&A for students on October 22nd from 11:30 am – 1:00 pm in Building 310, The Malaspina Theatre lobby.
That night (October 22nd), Dumont will do a community reading at Shq’apthut (A Gathering Place) from 7:30-9PM, along with musicians and a student poet from VIU’s Creative Writing and Journalism Department.
Marilyn Dumont is a celebrated poet of 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; it continues to be read and course-adopted across Canada and in the US. The Pemmican Eaters (2015) won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her most recent book is South Side of a Kinless River (Brick Books, 2024). She has been the writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities and the Edmonton Public Library as well as an advisor in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers Program at the Banff Centre. She is a full professor of Indigenous Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Check back soon for more information!