Black History Month 2024: Highlighting the Work of Nine Poets
In honour of Black History Month, Poetry Matters wishes to highlight the work of nine Black poets based in, or with ties to, Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Drawn from the suggestions of poets, students, faculty, and booksellers with connections to Poetry Matters, this list collects some of the writers currently inspiring our communities:
Montreal-based poet and translator D. M. Bradford is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (2021) and Bottom Rail on Top (2023). Dream of No One but Myself not only won the A.M. Klein poetry prize, but was also longlisted for many other prizes including the Governor General’s Literary Award. Bradford has also published an award-winning translation of Nicholas Dawson’s House Within a House (2023).
Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s published poetry collections include Bothism (2017) and Nouveau Griot (2018). A multilingual performer, producer, and Ashiq, Evanson has also published the novel Book of Wings (2021) which won the 2022 CAM/Blue Metropolis New Contributions Prize, and which she translated herself in 2023. She works in Montreal where she was born, and performs her poetry and music internationally.
Trinidadian poet, artist, and McGill student Joel Harris was recently shortlisted for Into the Void’s 2020 Poetry Prize. Harris’ work has appeared in publications such as The Heavy Feather Review, PRISM, the Berkely Poetry Review, and Anthropocene. He has also contributed to two books, The Alpha Barrier of North South Dialogue and The Twilight of America's Omnipresence.
Kaie Kellough is a Montreal-Based poet, novelist, and sound performer from Western Canada. His books include the novel Accordéon (2016), a collection of poetry titled Magnetic Equator (2019), and the collection of short fiction Dominoes at the Crossroads (2020). Amongst his other accomplishments, Kellough has won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. He is one of this year’s Montreal Poetry Prize jurors.
Kama La Mackarel is a multilingual Mauritian-Canadian writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator. They now live in Montreal where they have developed a multi-disciplinary and community based arts practice, creating, curating, and hosting queer performance-based events such as GENDER B(L)ENDER: queer open stage (2013-18) and The Self-Love Cabaret: l’amour se conjugue à la première personne (2012-22). La Mackarel’s award-winning book ZOM-FAM (2020) was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, and a Globe and Mail Best Debut.
Danielle Legros Georges, who is one of this year’s Montreal Poetry Prize jurors, is a professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a an award-winning writer and translator. Her published work includes Maroon (2001), Letters from Congo (2017), The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), and several poems published on poets.org, and in The Harvard Review.
A Professor of English and Theatre Studies at Guelph University, Canisia Lubrin is also a poet, editor, and writer. Her many accolades include the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the overall Literature prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Derek Walcott Prize. Lubrin’s works include Voodoo Hypnothesis (2017), The Dyzgraphxst (2020), and Code Noir (2023). On March 27th, she will be speaking at Concordia University, along with writer and Professor Christina Sharpe, as part of the Writers Read Series.
Born in Toronto, storyteller, performer, and poet Faith Paré now lives and works in Montreal. Paré has published several poems, essays, reviews, and interviews, in publications such as Metatron Press, The Capilano Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Amongst her other accomplishments, she was awarded the Irving Layton Award in Poetry in 2020, and received the Quebec Writer’s Federation’s inaugural Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers.
Nigel H. Thomas is an academic, poet, and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poems Moving through Darkness (1999), and The Voyage (2021), as well as six novels, three collections of short stories, and two academic books. Thomas holds several awards including the 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, the 2021 Quebec Writers' Association Judy Mappin Community Award, and the 2022 Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize for the Arts. Thomas was born in St. Vincent, and now lives in Montreal.
Many thanks to all those whose thoughtful contributions of experience and expertise went into the development of this list. Your engagement is invaluable.
National Poetry Month 2023 Feature
We are thrilled to be featured in the McGill University Faculty of Arts newsletter for the National Poetry Writing Month, with interviews from professors, students, and poets involved with our work. Read the complete feature here.
"'People are thinking about poetry much differently, as a kind of life current that helps us pay attention to the things that matter in our world,' says Professor Hickman. 'It’s a means of ‘knowing’, ‘knowing’ through feeling.'
We asked Anushree, Jana and James to share some of poets and poems that have stayed with them over the years. Happy reading!
James recommends:
'Bruce Snider is a poet I feel a particular kinship with. He was among the first contemporary poets I read in high school, and I pored over and imitated his style. Most of all, I love the dimensions of his poems. They are transparent, small, and dense; reading one is a little like adding drops of water to a coin until the surface tension breaks.'
Anushree recommends:
'The poem that has been on my mind since the pandemic a lot, especially since my last birthday has been Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”. I love this poem because I am a generally pessimistic and cynical person, and my struggle with anxiety doesn’t make it any easier for me to see the good in things that happen to or around me. And in the world that we inhabit, with natural calamities, political terror, and cultural conflicts of all kinds, it can get really tough to see the hope in the world. This poem knows all of this, it doesn’t negate it, and yet it is incredibly hopeful in choosing to turn to kindness as a possibility for change. I love that, and I think we all need to be told sometimes: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.'
Jana recommends:
'I have a real fondness for some of the first poems I encountered as an undergraduate. Whitman’s “Learn’d Astronomer,” for example — a poem of just 8 lines, which really isn’t very Whitman-esque in its style and doesn’t offer any revolutionary insights into the human experience. And yet, I still feel a rush of recognition whenever I return to re-read it, because it was one of the first texts that demonstrated to me just how effectively poetry can serve as a medium for conveying information, emotion, and experience.'"
Black History Month 2023: A Reading List
We offer to you a list of recommended readings by Black poets and writers. Drawn from the suggestions of poets, students, and faculty with connections to Poetry Matters, McGill, and Montreal, we bring forward this list not as any kind of definitive inventory, but rather as a snapshot of a few of the writers who currently inspire our communities’ thinking, teaching, learning, and creating. We seek to share the writers below and their representative works with a view toward awareness and appreciation of their work.
Clicking the hyperlink associated with a poet’s name will take you to their personal website, if available, or if not, to biographical information elsewhere. Hyperlinks associated with the indicated work will take you to a webpage where that work can be read or purchased.
Many thanks to all those whose thoughtful contributions of experience and expertise went into the development of this list. Your engagement is invaluable.