The School of Creative Writing is honoured to host poet and translator D.M. Bradford for a reading and conversation with poet and assistant professor Cecily Nicholson.
Together, they will trace the evolution of Bradford’s poetics across two collections of poetry—Bottom Rail on Top and Dream of No One but Myself—as well as their works of translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson and Ring of Dust by Louise Marois, and work in progress.
This lively discussion of poems, research, and process will illuminate Bradford’s distinct and sophisticated exploration of language as material rooted in personal, regional, and radical histories.
About the Speakers
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, translator and current Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. They hold a BA in Literature from Concordia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and edit Poetry Pause, the League of Canadian Poets poem-a-day newsletter. They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), an interdisciplinary memoir that explores the versioning aspects of Bradford and their family’s histories with abuse and trauma. The collection won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General Literary Award and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award, and was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Their most recent hybrid collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023), works to complicate prevailing conceptions of Blackness by staging one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life. The book was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the A. M. Klein Prize and was named a 2023 Best Canadian Poetry Book by the CBC. As a translator of Quebec writing, Bradford’s work is focused on experimental poetic practices on the margins. Their first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the Warland Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was also a Governor General Literary Awards finalist. Their latest translation, Ring of Dust by Louise Marois, was published by Brick Books in spring 2025. While currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples, Bradford makes their home in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) on the unceded territory of the Kanienʼkehá:ka nation.
Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. She is the inaugural honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society and was the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley. Nicholson teaches in the School of Creative Writing at UBC. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, follows the diurnal movement of crows.
Access
The School of Creative Writing is committed to making our events as accessible as possible. If you have questions or requests about access, please reach out to Sheryda Warrener at s.warrener@ubc.ca.
