• Luminato 2023

Donna Bailey Nurse

• Literary Critic

Donna Bailey Nurse is a leading Canadian literary critic who specializes in the work of Black women writers. She is a columnist for CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter and a contributor to Walrus, Maclean’s, The Literary Review of Canada and The Globe and Mail. Her work has also appeared in National Post, The Toronto Star, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly and many other publications. Over the years she has interviewed dozens of writers among them Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Wole Soyinka, Marilynne Robinson, Bernardine Evaristo, Jamaica Kincaid, Esi Edugyan, Austin Clarke, Angie Thomas, Lawrence Hill and Chimamanda Adichie.   

Donna is the author of two volumes of What’s a Black Critic to Do? (Insomniac) and the Editor of Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing(M&S). She has taught Arts Journalism at George Brown College in Toronto and been a guest lecturer at Mount Allison University, the University of Moncton, the University of Toronto and The Toronto Public Library. She has been a member of the Toronto Arts Council’s Literary Committee and a juror for the Ontario Council of the Arts and the Canada Council. She has curated events for The Toronto Public Library, The Art gallery of Ontario and at The Gardiner Museum. Donna has served as a juror for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Prize, the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize. She is currently working on a people’s history of Black Canada called The Black Album, part of a two book deal for Harper Collins Canada which includes a memoir of her Jamaican- Canadian family.  Donna was born in Toronto and grew up in Pickering, Ontario. She is married to Jefferson, with two adult children, Alexander and Noelle. She lives in Toronto.