Marilyn Dumont’s fifth book of poetry, South Side of a Kinless River (Brick Books, 2024), wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. These poems, telling of land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities, add up to a Métis woman’s prairie history.

Dumont’s first four books were A Really Good Brown Girl (Brick, 1996), which won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award; green girl dreams Mountains (Oolichan, 2001); that tongued belonging (Kegedonce Press, 2007); and The Pemmican Eaters (MisFit, 2015), which won the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Dumont is proud of Métis family lines from her mother’s – Vaness / Dufresne – and her father’s – Boudreau / Dumont – families.

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. A full professor of Indigenous Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta, she lives in Edmonton.