Black Writers Matter

Afua Cooper's doctoral dissertation on Henry Bibb is a pioneering work on the life of the 19th-century abolitionist. She teaches African-Canadian history at the University of Toronto and is co-author of "We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History" (University of Toronto Press, 1994). In February 2002, Afua curated "A Glimpse of Black Life in Victorian Toronto: 1850-1860" for the City of Toronto Museum Division.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Foreword * Performing Miracles: Black Writers Matter * Dr. Afua Cooper Introduction * The Act of Gathering * Whitney French EVERYDAY PEOPLE What Will You Tell Your Children * Simone Makeba Dalton Glass Lasagna * Cason Sharpe Hunger Games: A Quiz * Rowan McCandless Being a Shark: Reflections on Blackness in Canadian Wilderness * Phillip Dwight Morgan Heavy Scarves * Fatuma Adar In Chayo's Cab: An Interview with Chayo Moses Nywello * Whitney French Uninterrupted * Meshama Rose Eyob-Austin Progress Report * Christina Brobby LETTERS TO COMMUNITY Diasporic Narratives: Lived Experiences of Canadians of African Descent in Rural New Brunswick * Mary Louise McCarthy Paternal Blood Memory: Volume 1 * Kyla Farmer On Haunted Places: Encountering Slavery in Quebec * Delice Mugabo The Place That Is Supposed To Be Safe * Angela Wright Shame and the Kinship of Sexual Violence * Rachel Zellers A Family Complication: Writing About Race as a Black, South Asian Woman * Eternity Martis My Ancestors' Wildest Dreams: Interviews of Identity, Selfhood and Joy with Afro-Indigenous Youth * Shammy Belmore, Simone Blais, Wenzdae Brewster, Kaya Joan BLACK WRITERS MATTER Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press * Makeda Silvera Becoming Poetry: Queer Blackness as the Full Absorption of Light * Sapphire Woods Memorialty * Christelle Saint-Julien Fiction Is Not Frivolous: A Lecture * H. Nigel Thomas A Picture of Words * Angela Walcott Demand Space * Chelene Knight Black/Disabled/Artist * Brandon Wint About the Authors

"Black Writers? African, Bluesy, Classical, Disrespectful, Erudite, Fiery, Groovy, Haunting, Inspiring, Jazzy, Knowing, Liberating, Militant, Nervy, Optimistic, Pugnacious, Quixotic, Rambunctious, Seductive, Truculent, Urgent, Vivacious, Wicked, X-ray sharp, Yearning, Zesty. And so, they matter!" -- George Elliott Clarke "Reading these stories gave me both joy and grief." -- Afua Cooper "Black Writers Matter is an extraordinary achievement, a bold and loving gathering of Black writing in its sublimity; its stylistic and thematic complexity; its regional, cultural, generational, and experiential differences; its fiercely constellated energy. Whitney French and the talented contributors to this book offer us vital new writings within a two-hundred-year legacy of yearning and truth-telling. Please read this book." -- David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant and Brother "This book is as pretty as a present you can't bring yourself to open. And it is just as beautiful on the inside. Marvellous and life-changing for many people, I'm sure." -- Donna Bailey Nurse, columnist for CBC Radio's The Next Chapter "Collected in these pages are voices that need to be urgently heard, engaged and reckoned with. Black life, Black Canadian life, Black Canadian diasporic life in full colour and full of desire is on offer in Black Writers Matter. " -- Rinaldo Walcott, professor at University of Toronto and author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies