Let’s Talk About It: York University Libraries Authors Series

This much-anticipated, game-changing special edition of Canada's premier annual fiction anthology celebrates the country's best emerging Black writers. For over thirty years, The Journey Prize Stories has consistently introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. The 33rd edition of Canada's most prestigious annual fiction anthology proudly continues this tradition by celebrating the best emerging Black writers in the country, as selected by a jury comprising internationally acclaimed, award-winning writers David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan, and Canisia Lubrin.

Poet, essayist, and activist Ayanna Black has compiled a fine collection of poems and stories by 15 Canadian writers of the African diaspora. Voices covers an extraordinary amount of ground, both internal and geographical, and helps us understand more fully what being a Canadian writer means. Canadian literature courses need this book.

The latest work from pioneering scholar George Elliott Clarke, Directions Homeis the most comprehensive analysis of African-Canadian texts and writers to date. Building on the discoveries of his critically acclaimed Odysseys Home, Clarke passionately analyses the beautiful complexities and haunting conundrums of this important body of literature.

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of "black prairie" literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century.  This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like.

This collection features essays on Nova Scotia-born poet, playwright and literary critic George Elliott Clarke. Instrtumental in promoting the writing of writers of African descent, Clarke's work has won awards including the Governor General's Award for poetry. He is also the recipient of seven honorary doctorates.

Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada's black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger--yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian.

Queering Urban Justice foregrounds visions of urban justice that are critical of racial and colonial capitalism, and asks: What would it mean to map space in ways that address very real histories of displacement and erasure? What would it mean to regard Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) as geographic subjects who model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space?

Buller Men and Batty Bwoys offers the reader critical insight into the complex lives of Black gay and bisexual men in Canada. Equally important, Crichlow's research makes a substantial and original contribution to the limited body of academic work in this area.

Toronto has long been a place that people of colour move to in order to join queer of colour communities. Yet the city's rich history of activism by queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and racialized people (QTBIPOC) remains largely unwritten and unarchived. While QTBIPOC have a long and visible presence in the city, they always appear as newcomers in queer urban maps and archives in which white queers appear as the only historical subjects imaginable.

Based on in-depth interviews and extensive observation, Frances Henry's study provides a richly detailed overview of the major cultural institutions in the lives of Afro-Caribbean residents of Toronto.

A remarkable memoir about achieving prosperity in the face of relentless prejudice. "In the Black" traces B. Denham Jolly's personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination.

A vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped George Elliott Clarke's early life in the Black Canadian community that he calls Africadia, centred in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This volume compiles writings by and about Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a nineteenth-century Black radical feminist, an abolitionist, suffragist, and one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. Reading about Shadd Cary today shows how Black women during the 1800s fought for racial and gender justice and how they addressed topics that continue to inspire debate today, like racism, feminism, labor, and internationalism.

As the major gateway into British North America for travelers on the Underground Railroad, the U.S./Canadian border along the Detroit River was a boundary that determined whether thousands of enslaved people of African descent could reach a place of freedom and opportunity.

Stories of the hopeful, brave people who fled slavery and made Toronto their home. Lawrence Hill explores Toronto's role as a destination for thousands of freedom seekers before the American Civil War. This new edition traces pathways taken by people, enslaved and free, who courageously made the trip north in search of liberty and offers new biographies, images, and information, some of which is augmented by a 2015 archaeological dig in downtown Toronto.

Richard Pierpoint or Captain Dick, as he was commonly known, emerges from the shadows of history. An African warrior who was captured at about age 16, Pierpoint lived his remaining years in exile. From his birth in Bundu (now part of Senegal) around 1744 until his death in rural Ontario in 1837, Pierpoint's life allows us to glimpse the activity of an African involved in some of the world's great events.

During the night of April 10, 1734, Montréal burned. Marie-Joseph Angélique, a twenty-nine-year-old slave, was arrested, tried, and found guilty of starting the blaze that consumed forty-six buildings. Suspecting that she had not acted alone and angered that she had maintained her innocence, Angélique's condemners tortured her after the trial. She confessed but named no accomplices.

During the American Revolution (1775-1783), the British government offered freedom to slaves who would desert their rebel masters as a way of ruining the American economy. After the final surrender of the British to the Americans, New York City was evacuated by the British Army throughout the summer and fall of 1783. Carried away with them were a vast number of White Loyalists and their families, and over 3,000 Black Loyalists: free, indentured, apprenticed, or still enslaved. More than 2,700 Blacks came to Nova Scotia.