Eternity Martis is a Toronto-based journalist and editor whose work has been featured in Vice, Salon, Huffington Post, Broadly, xoJane, The Walrus, tvo.org, cbc, ctv, Hazlitt, Complex, The Fader, Canadaland, and more.
Storyteller and chai lover, Rowan McCandless writes from Treaty 1 territory—the original lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and homeland of the Métis Nation. An eighth-generation Africadian on her father’s side, she won first place in Room’s 2017 Creative Nonfiction Contest and second place in Room’s 2015 Annual Poetry and Fiction Contest. Rowan also placed second in Prairie Fire’s 2016 Annual Fiction Contest and recently was longlisted for Prism International’s 2017 Creative Nonfiction contest.
Mary Louise McCarthy is a seventh-generation woman of African descent from the province of New Brunswick. She received her BA in 1991 (York University), MEd in critical studies in 2007 (University of New Brunswick), and is currently working on her PhD in social justice (oise, University of Toronto). In 2015, Mary Louise won a four-and-a-half-year battle through the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal where her case of racial profiling was successful. Mary Louise’s doctoral research is dedicated to the early African settlers of New Brunswick and she is highlighting their lives, experiences, and subsequent segregated deaths.
Phillip Dwight Morgan is an emerging journalist, poet, and essayist of Jamaican heritage. His poetry and articles have appeared on macleans.ca, cbc.ca, and rabble.ca, as well as in Briarpatch and Spacing magazines. Born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario, Phillip uses writing to explore questions of race, representation, identity, and belonging in a Canadian context. Phillip views writing as a process of self-discovery, emancipation, and nourishment.
Délice Igicari M. Mugabo completed her MSc in geography, urban and environmental studies at Concordia University. Her work explored anti-black Islamophobia and the history of Muslim Black activism in Montreal in the 1990s. Currently a PhD student at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, her doctoral research examines the violence and punishment enslaved Black women fought against in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Québec.
Chayo Moses Nyawello is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, Department of National Defence, Reserve 4crpg in Coy, bc. A former cab driver, Chayo now owns and runs a small business with his business partner, Mr. Patrick Watson: North Coast Transportation, acta-inc.
Christelle Saint-Julien is a Montreal-born and -based writer, musician, and translator. A hyperactive brainard, her first love really is music. She makes a living putting words together in different contexts.
Cason Sharpe is a writer born in Toronto and currently based in Montreal. His work has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and prism International, among others. He is the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Realness and Other Stories (Metatron, 2017).
Makeda Silvera is a Caribbean-Canadian lesbian feminist who was the publisher and managing editor of Sister Vision Press for sixteen years, from its inception in 1985 to its closing in 2001. Sister Vision Press was a groundbreaking, award-winning press, both nationally and internationally.
Silvera is also an activist and author. Silvera’s essays and short stories have appeared in many publications. She also tutored at York University’s Writing Centre for many years.
H(ubert) Nigel Thomas was born in St. Vincent and now lives in Montreal, Canada. He is a retired professor of American literature and the author of ten books and dozens of essays. His novels, Spirits in the Dark (1993) and No Safeguards (2015), were shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize. In 2013, he was awarded Université Laval’s Hommage aux créateurs. His novel Behind the Face of Winter (2001) and short story collection Lives: Whole and Otherwise (2010) have been translated into French. He is the founder and principal coordinator of Logos Readings.
Angela Walcott is a multidisciplinary artist who aims to reshape the canvas with a unique sensibility that combines visual and written storytelling in nuanced ways. She has written reviews for various publications including Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Public Journal, this, and Canadian Children’s Book News. Her artwork and photography have been exhibited at yyz Gallery, Project Gallery, El Space, and the Skylight Gallery. She is the author of the children’s picture book I Want To Be.
Brandon Wint is a poet, spoken word artist, and organizer currently living in Edmonton, Alberta. He is interested in using the potential of his poetry in combination with his physical potential as a Black, disabled person to tell stories of deep personal meaning and to situate himself sturdily in our complex world. He is a former Canadian poetry slam champion and a lover of poetic expression, wherever and however it can be found.
Sapphire Woods is a queer nerd with a passion for Black education and a nurturer of Black joy! Holding her masters of education, she plans on creating Black-youth-focused curricula through graphic novel education and transformative justice. Sapphire’s positive obsessions are with Afrofuturism, graphic novels, being a plant mom, and eating ice cream.
Angela Wright is a writer and performance artist based in Toronto. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Quarterly. She also works in politics and her political commentary has appeared in Maclean’s, Toronto Star, cbc Opinion, Montreal Gazette, Torontoist, and Overland Literary Journal. She is currently working on a personal memoir of a young woman who reflects on her childhood after experiencing hate crimes.
Rachel Zellars is a mother, professor, and co-founder of Third Eye Collective, the first organization in Montreal to support Black women who are survivors of gender-based violence. Originally a farm girl from upstate New York, she has lived in Montreal, Quebec, since 2015.
Alice Walker, Foreword to Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018, xii.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/emancipation.htm
On December 25, 1992, Kafe sent a seven-page letter to the mayor of Verdun, the Human Rights Commission, the Department of Education, and the Ministry of Cultural Communities in which he detailed the injustices he had endured from students and school officials and alerted them to the toll that anti-black violence takes on Black people living in Montreal (Ruggles and Rovinescu 1996). His letter was titled “Please help avoid a shooting rampage in Verdun.” In it, Kafe explained that the Deux-Montagnes school board and their appointed psychiatrist organized a medical plot against him. Kafe then reminds his readers that previous cases of injustice had brought individuals to retaliate violently and publicly and that is why state officials must intervene against institutional racism. He recalled the case of a man who spent twenty-seven years trying to “tell the story of his trauma” but was ignored. The man, the letter states, went on to cut into pieces every human that came into sight. In the last paragraph, Kafe writes, “I am not anticipating any shooting rampage in Verdun, but everybody knows what provocations and injustice of this magnitude can do” (Ruggles 1993, 6). Arguing that the letter consisted of a death threat against Dr. Marc Guérin (the school board’s psychiatrist whose office was in Verdun), Kafe was arrested, denied bail, jailed, and later detained at the Philippe Pinel Institute, a psychiatric hospital (Buckie 1993, A4).
https://wraabe.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/abraham-lincoln-to-harriet-beecher-stowe-the-author-of-this-great-war/
cbc Books: The Next Chapter, “Donna Bailey Nurse on black women writers.”
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