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Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, editor, and translator based in Tioh’tia:ke (Montréal). He holds a BA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. A lifelong Montrealer, Bradford’s work formally engages and frustrates dominant conceptions of Blackness in the Diaspora. His poetry has appeared in, among others, Prairie FireThe Fiddleheadfilling StationThe Capilano ReviewCarte Blanche, and anthologized in The Unpublished City, a 2018 Toronto Book Awards finalist. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Call Out (2017), Nell Zink Is Damn Free (2017), and The Plot (2018). Bradford’s first book, Dream of No One but Myself,  is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the versioning aspects of his and his family’s histories with abuse and trauma.

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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