DI BRANDT grew up in Reinland, a conservative, separatist Mennonite village in southern Manitoba, and left home at 17 to live in Winnipeg. "This was such a drastic change for me that I went into culture shock for a long, long time," she says. "Writing poetry helped me bridge the gap between my two cultural identities, and helped me understand who I was and who I wanted to be." Di took her BA at the University of Manitoba. She went on to an MA at the University of Toronto and a PhD in English literature at the University of Manitoba.

Di Brandt has published five collections of poetry: Now You Care (Toronto: Coach House, 2003), Jerusalem, beloved (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1995), mother, not mother (Toronto: Mercury, 1992), Agnes in the sky (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1990) and questions i asked my mother (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1987). She has also published a critical study of contemporary Canadian women's texts, Wild Mother Dancing:Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1993), and a collection of creative essays on cross-cultural poetics, Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing Across the Centuries (Toronto: Mercury, 1996). She also recently released Awakenings, a collaborative poetry/music CD with Dorothy Livesay (posthumously), Carol Ann Weaver, and Rebecca Campbell.

She has received the Canadian Author's Association National Poetry Award, the McNally Robinson Award for Manitoba Book of the Year, and the Gerald Lampert Award, and has been twice shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, as well as the Dillons Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Di Brandt is a former poetry editor of Prairie Fire Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2.

Her poetry has been set to music and adapted for theatre, CD, film, video, radio, television, multimedia performance and dance. She is currently writing Berlin Notes, based on a six month sabbatical visit to that city (the first chapter was a cover feature in Prairie Fire Fall 2003), and co-editing two volumes of proceedings from the conference/festival, Wider Bioundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry (University of Windsor, 2001), with Barbara Godard of York University. She is also co-producing Planet Earth, a musical CD featuring settings of Canadian women's poetry by well-known composers like Violet Archer, Barbara Pentland, Chester Duncan, Jana Skarecky, Paul McIntyre, and others (performed, commissioned for, and premiered at the Wider Boundaries conference/festival), together with Barbara Godard, Jana Skarecky, and Brenda Muller. Her poetry suite, Sweet Sweet Blood will be premiered at the Sounding in the Land music conference at the University of Waterloo in May, 2004.

On March 31, 2004, Di Brandt's most recent book of poetry, Now You Care, was shortlisted for both the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize and Ontario's Trillium Book Award.

You can visit Di's web site at www.dibrandt.ca