Happy Mid-Autumn Moon Festival! It's harvest season, the leaves are turning, the tomatoes are still ripening, and Paper Birch Books is hosting our first official book launch. We're over the moon to welcome acclaimed local poet Marilyn Dumont in launching her newest book, South Side of a Kinless River on September 27. Our event is officially at full capacity but there is a waitlist if anyone cancels. Register here.
South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities figure into these poems. They add up to a Métis woman’s prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.
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. Her most recent book, The Pemmican Eaters (2015), won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award. 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.