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Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, editor, translator, and sometimes curator. A lifelong Montrealer, Bradford’s work formally engages and frustrates dominant conceptions of Blackness in the Diaspora. They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General Literary Award and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award, and was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Bradford’s first translation, House Within a House (2023) by Nicholas Dawson, received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards for French-to-English translation. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top (2023), works to complicate prevailing conceptions of Blackness by staging one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life. Bradford holds a BA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. They live and work in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal) on the unceded territory of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka nation.

Dream of No One but Myself 2022 Shortlist

Brick Books, Canada

Judges’ Citation

Dream of No One but Myself immerses the reader into an archival torrent of intergeneration trauma.

Dream of No One but Myself immerses the reader into an archival torrent of intergeneration trauma. This stunning debut never settles for formal complacency as it navigates the rhythmical intelligence of linguistic play, the anguished vigilance of footnotes, and the creased visual proofs of tenderness. Amid his troubled subjects, David Bradford’s most urgent relationship is with language. The poet’s inventive language never slips into just a stunt: it surprises and stirs with its honesty and vulnerability and manages to make whole everything it has so spectacularly torn.


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