Alchemy editorial director Dionne Brand.

About five years ago, award-winning poet, novelist, and editor Dionne Brand was having a casual conversation with her editor Lynn Henry. 

Brand was talking about the kind of writing that she loved and wanted to see more of in the world – writing that takes the reader as “another intelligent being” who can follow along as a writer de-centers colonial models of thought, or mixes genre or narrative linearity to disrupt the existing expectations between a work and its reader. 

That conversation continued, with a view to how they could bring more works like this into existence at Knopf, where Henry is editor-in-chief, and in June 2022, the creation of a new imprint at Knopf, with Brand as editorial director, was announced. 

Alchemy launched its first season in August, with the posthumous publication of Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: Life in Fragments. The book tracks Troeung’s family history, cultural history, and personal struggles, moving through time and place from Cambodia in the 1970s to Hong Kong in the 2000s and Vancouver in the late 2010s. Dang died of pancreatic cancer in November 2022 at the age of 42 and the book includes poignant letters to her young son that she wrote while she was ill. 

The manuscript came to Brand about a year before the book was published, not long after the launch of Alchemy was first announced. Author Madeleine Thien, a friend of Troeung’s, asked if she could send Brand the manuscript of Landbridge. 

“We were looking and searching and we had many things in mind and it landed in my inbox. I said, yay, this is exactly it,” Brand says. “We were lucky. To find the exact thing that we needed to begin [the list] was great. Not to overuse the word alchemy, but it just worked like that.”

With Alchemy, Brand is looking for books that take ordinary objects and elements and transform them: “mixing them in different ways, and coming up with something shiny and wondrous – a new ingredient, a new substance,” she says. 

Although Brand and Henry first began discussing a potential imprint several years ago, the ideas and traditions she is looking to explore and upend are even more important today. 

“None of it is a terrible mystery that we come into the world with the consciousness of where we are geologically, ecologically, where we are in terms of the social, and we’re in a very dynamic time, a time of this deep climate crisis, and also kind of a deep political crisis,” Brand says. “What kind of a world do we want? And what kinds of narratives might bring about the one that we want, or might intervene in it in some way, might show us what we are in, might indicate where we might be? Not prescriptive, but speculative.”

Henry, who serves as publishing director at Alchemy, says that in the aftermath of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, she and Brand started to pursue more concrete objectives for the discussions they’d been having. 

“We realized that this thing we’d been talking about in vague terms, that perhaps this was the moment to try to talk to people inside Penguin Random House about the potential for a line of books that really takes a different look at the world,” she says.  

The creation of the imprint was accompanied by the creation of a lecture series at York University, run by author, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities Christina Sharpe. As with the imprint, the Alchemy Lecture also began life as a seed in a conversation. Sharpe raised the idea at a dinner with Brand, Henry, and Knopf Canada publisher Martha Kanya-Forstner and the series grew from there. 

The annual event gathers a group of speakers of different backgrounds and disciplines, each of whom prepares a talk and essay on the same subject. 

“As Christina proposed in the first one, what if we put together an architect, a poet, a philosopher, and a cultural theorist … and we pointed them at a particular topic, what would happen? What would they bring together?”

Sharpe convenes the lectures, and Alchemy publishes the collection the following year. The first lecture, titled “Borders, Human Itineraries and All Our Relation,” took place at York in November 2022; the book of the same name will be released this month. This year’s lecture, “Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World,” features Cherokee professor and author Joseph M. Pierce, U.K.-based multimedia artist Phoebe Boswell, award-winning Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, American writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, and Brazilian film scholar Janaína Oliveira. It takes place November 2. 

Brand has a number of titles in the stables: Alchemy has acquired a novel by poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek titled We the Kindling, which is expected to publish next spring; translation rights to Brazilian writer Eliana Alves Cruz’s third novel, Solitaria, due out next fall; and Theory of Water, a nonfiction book by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, which is expected to publish in spring 2025. Also on the horizon is The Lexicon: A Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness, by Princeton professor Tina Campt and the Practising Refusal Collective. Henry says the imprint is looking at publishing four books a year, with one of them being the Alchemy Lecture title. 

Brand says the search for works that fit Alchemy is “to run with constant curiosity,” at times even looking beyond writing and across artistic media, to find creators who are “doing some brilliant thinking through really radical visions.”

“All books, of course, imagine the world. But I’m hoping that Alchemy books reimagine it and start from what we know now, that those books always break orthodoxies of subject and of audience, and don’t lead you to the same deadly conclusions that have brought us to this world where we are now,” Brand says.