- October 23 2025, 7 - 8:30 pm
Marilyn Dumont will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture. 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.
Biography: 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.