IRR faculty fellow Dionne Irving Bremyer's newest book The Islands, has been listed on both the NPR Best Books of the Year list for 2022 and the New York Times recommended books for the first week of December. The short story collection follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism.
Originally from Toronto, Ontario, Dionne Irving Bremyer is an associate professor of English in Notre Dame's creative writing program and a faculty fellow at the Initiative on Race and Resilience. She writes fiction and nonfiction that investigates and questions personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world.
Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Two essays, “Treading Water” and “Do You Like to Hurt,” were notable essays in Best American Essays 2017 and 2019. She is the author of the novel Quint (7.13 Books), a fictional retelling of the true story of the Dionne Quintuplets. Her edited collection Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press) includes essays that deal with the varied and complicated ways in which cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding.
Irving Bremyer been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has been awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference.