This story is part of Notre Dame Global's series titled "Women Who Inspire."
If there’s one thing Dionne Irving Bremyer tries to impart on every student that she teaches, it’s that they will leave her class as better thinkers and better humans.
And it’s not because they’re debating philosophy or studying sociology. It’s because they’re reading and writing, and in doing so, they’re learning how to think critically and compassionately about the world around them. If reading reveals the near-invisible threads that tie us together across countries, cultures, and chasms of differences, writing is what helps us parse through those threads, form our own opinions about them, and integrate their meaning into our lives.
An associate professor of English at Notre Dame, and instructor of the Notre Dame Kylemore Creative Writing program, Dionne has been with the University for five years. She’s a Giller Prize-nominated author, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the director of Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience. She’s a wife, a mother, and a self-professed “Real Housewives Historian.” She’s a story-consumer and a storyteller.
San Francisco.
Stories are how Dionne engages with the world and connects to other people. A Canadian native with Jamaican heritage, she’s long been interested in how narratives travel and find new meaning in each place they land, resonating deeply with audiences seemingly unlike their source. When Dionne went on tour for her collection of short stories, The Islands, she said that one of the most exciting parts was meeting people who’d read her work. “Writing is really solitary,” she admits. The stories she wrote, while fiction, were so personal to her own experience that she worried they wouldn’t resonate with an audience that existed outside her own head. But in meeting and talking with readers, her fears were quickly diminished. “I found the stories spoke to all different kinds of people.”
And that’s the beauty of storytelling, of reading and writing. They’re activities that exist in your mind, but at the same time, draw you out of yourself. They force you to encounter a reality outside of your own, and Dionne would argue that we are better for it. “How great is it that you can read a story of somebody in the Victorian upper classes, or you can read a story that's set in modern-day Nairobi, and you can have this transformative experience of time and place and culture?”
That’s why she’s not bothered by the fact that some students may not write again outside of the courses she teaches. Because even if they don’t realize it, they’re getting something invaluable out of the class: the ability to problem solve. “I think having the ability to think through the problems of other human beings is a real skill. How do we talk to each other? How do we think about the fact that there's a person out there whose life is remarkably different than my own, and meet them where they are?” These are the kinds of questions prompted by creative writing, Dionne says.
she teaches at ND Kylemore.
The values of empathy and community have long been central to Dionne’s work. In fact, she started as a psychology major in school because she wanted to understand other people’s lived experiences, their problems and struggles, and how community is created around those feelings that make us human. She soon realized she could accomplish the same thing through writing.
She credits the professors she had in school for encouraging her. It was never a question of “Can I do this?” because she was surrounded by teachers who affirmed her talent, and pushed her to go further with it. She even pursued a Ph.D., something she said she never thought she’d do. Now, as a professor herself, she hopes to send the same message to her students. She encourages them to engage with the world, to find things that interest them about people and their stories, and to be a devoted reader as well as writer if they want to pursue writing. Most of all, she teaches the importance of looking outside yourself. “I think good writers are in some ways anathema to selfishness,” Dionne says.
professor after a reading at her alma mater.
In her own writing, Dionne is especially inspired by writers like Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, women whose voices contributed to and shaped conversations around identity, injustice, and community. Women, Dionne would add, have a natural role in storytelling. A former professor at Saint Mary’s, Dionne advocates for the power of community found in womanhood and sisterhood. “One of the things that’s interesting to me about women is the way that even our bodies carry stories.” Long after she’s gone, Dionne marvels at how her bones will retain and reveal a core aspect of her identity: mother.
She points to how this idea of women as the “keepers of stories” is reflected across cultures and in many religions, including that of Notre Dame, Our Lady’s University. “Why do we revere the mother of the deity? Because the mother is the thing that he can't be in the world without, right? Women are a conduit to storytelling, and I think that there's something really, really powerful about that.” It’s safe to say that Dionne has wielded that power well—and she's teaching her students to do the same.
Originally published by at global.nd.edu on March 26, 2026.