Rishma Dunlop

Rishma Dunlop is an award winning Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and translator. Her books of poetry include: White Album (2008), Metropolis (2005), Reading Like a Girl (2004), and The Body of My Garden (2002). Books and journals as editor include: An Ecopoetics Reader: Art, Literature and Place (2008); White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (2007), and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (2004). She was a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 1998 and received the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003.  Her radio drama, “The Raj Kumari’s Lullaby,” was produced by CBC Radio in 2005. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including The Literary Review(US), Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Louisiana Review, Literary Review of Canada, CV2, Canadian Literature, Descant, Event, Grain, The Comstock Review, Literator (South Africa). Dunlop’s translations of poems by Cuban poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela were published in the The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World (2009).

Rishma Dunlop collaborates frequently with other artists, painters, photographers, and musicians. Her recent book, White Album, includes the paintings of Fort Langley, B.C. artist, Suzanne Northcott. She has also collaborated on various publications with Toronto photographer Joe Paczuski.

Dunlop is founding editor of Studio, an online international literary journal.  www.studiopoetry.ca

Dunlop’s research interests include: diasporic and hybrid world literatures, transnational studies, contemporary poetry and poetics, poetics and politics of witness, contemporary art and aesthetics, creative writing and pedagogy. She is a frequent keynote speaker for international conferences on interdisciplinary arts, education and public pedagogy, human rights and literature, cultural theory, literary studies, and creativity. She has given keynotes, lectures and readings at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki; University of New Mexico; McGill University; Queen’s University, School of Policy Studies; University of British Columbia; Lakehead University; Stanford, and Arizona State University.

Rishma Dunlop is a professor of English and Creative Writing at York University, Toronto. She also holds appointments in the Faculty of Education, Department of English and Graduate Schools of Women’s Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies. She served as Poet in Residence at the University of British Columbia in 2006-2007. Her work has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. She has been awarded the Canada-US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

In her role as a Canada-US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Creative Writing in 2009-2010, Rishma Dunlop will be Resident at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, engaging in creative and scholarly activities, guest lectures, and public readings. During her term as Visiting Research Chair, she will be working on a multi-genre book, Midnight at the Algonquin Hotel.

Rishma is a Short Form 2010 mentor and worked with Mahlikah Aweri.