PA READINGS
BLACK
CANADIAN AUTHORS
Bissoondath, Neil 1955 –
Neil Bissoondath came to Toronto at the age of 18 from Trinidad. He focuses on contemporary themes of cultural dislocation, revolution, and the shifting politics of the Third World. His compelling stories are about West Indians in their strife-torn islands; West Indian and other immigrants in Canada; and the victims of violence in nameless, fragile countries around the world.
Dionne Brand won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On. Her novel In Another Place, No Here was short listed for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award. Dionne Brand delivers a distinguished, visionary work, grounded in the language and legacy of her native Trinidad. She lives in Toronto.
Kim Barry Brunhuber is a writer, television reporter, and documentary filmmaker who lives in Ottawa. His news stories have been broadcast around the globe and he also hosts a nationally distributed book review segment. Born in Montreal, he has a master of journalism degree from Carleton University. Like other African-Canadian writers, Brunhuber describes unflinchingly, in flamboyant tints, the realities of living in Canada and between ‘colours.’
Austin Clarke was born in Barbados and came to Canada in 1955 to study at the University of Toronto. He has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil rights leader, professor, and diplomat, representing Barbados as its Cultural Attaché in Washington DC. He has received many honours including the most recent, the Order of Canada. He is the author of eight novels and five collection of short fiction. Austin Clarke is widely studied in Canadian universities. He lives in Toronto.
Cyril Dabydeen has published more than a dozen books of prose and poetry in the United Kingdom and Canada. As his international reputation grew, the City of Ottawa appointed him Poet Laureate in the mid-1980s and granted him the first Award of Excellence for Writing and Publishing. Cyril Dabydeen’s short stories shuttle with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada. He teaches English at the University of Ottawa in Ontario.
PA READINGS
Cecil Foster was born in Barbados and moved to Canada in 1978. His first novel No Man in the House, was published to critical acclaim in the United States and Canada. Foster conveys the powerlessness and fear that saturate the life of a single West Indian woman struggling to support children in a damaged society. Since leaving his position of senior editor at the Financial Post, Foster has worked for CBC radio and television and has written for several leading magazines.
Karolyn Frost is an archaeologist and historian based in Toronto, Canada. Her thirty-year career in multicultural program development and antiracist education has included the establishment of the Archaeological Resource Centre. Toronto’s innovative learning facility. She is the executive director of the Ontario Historical Society. I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land is the result of decades of exhaustive research by the author. It is a rare and moving tale of deliverance and an important contribution to the literature of the Underground Railroad.
Lawrence Hill grew up in Toronto in the 1960s. He was influenced by his parents’ work as pioneers in Canada’s human rights movement and in writing about the history of blacks in Canada. He has lived and worked across Canada, Spain, France, West Africa and the United States. He is the author of a memoir, a novel and two books about the history of blacks in Canada. Lawrence Hill lives in Burlington, Ontario.
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, has lived in Guyana, Trinidad and moved to Canada when she was a teenager. Nalo Hopkinson has won numerous awards including the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. Her award winning short fiction collection Skin Folk was selected for the 2002 New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. She lives in Toronto.
Rabindranath Maharaj’s first novel, Homer in Flight, was short listed for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and broadcast on CBC’s Between the Covers. A previous collection of short stories, The Interloper, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. The Lagahoo’s Apprentice was selected by The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star as the best book of 2000. Maharaj brings on a procession of angry, equivocal, caustically funny Trinidadian monologists. He lives in Ajax, Ontario.
PA READINGS
Tessa McWatt is the author of two novels, Out of My Skin and Dragons Cry both published to widespread acclaim. Dragons Crys was short listed for the Governor General’s Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Tessa McWatt is originally from Guyana, but she has spent much of her life in Canada. She now divides her time between Toronto and London.
Nega Mezlekia is the author of Notes from the Hyena’s Belly, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and winner of the Governor General’s Award. That memoir was about Ethiopia. His first novel The God Who Begat a Jackal is steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic, and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. Nega Mezlekia left Ethiopia in 1983 and is now an engineer living in Toronto.
Shani Mootoo is the author of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and an internationally acclaimed novel, which was a finalist for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the B.C. Book Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and The Giller Prize. Born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, Mootoo moved to Canada at the age of nineteen and began a career as an artist. In addition to writing prose and poetry, she is also an active video artist. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Odhiambo, David N.
David Nandi Odhiambo was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1965 and moved to Canada in 1977. After finishing high school, he went to McGill University. Upon graduation, he ended up in Vancouver where he began writing while also working with street kids as a caregiver. His play, Afrocentric has been produced in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto. Odhiambo’s second novel, Kipligat’s Chance is about a young Kenyan immigrant striving to excel in athletics and to lift himself out of a daunting raft of troubles. He is currently living in Massachusetts, where he is pursuing a graduate degree.
Kayla Perrin has her bachelor’s degrees in English and sociology and a bachelor of education. In six years, she has had nineteen original releases published. She has received an Arts Acclaim Award for her writing from the city of Brampton, Ontario, and has twice won Romance Writers of America’s Top Ten Favorite Books of the Year Award. Kayla has also won a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine for multicultural romance. She spends her time between Toronto and Miami, Florida.
PA READINGS
Mairuth Sarsfield was born and bred in Montreal and has lived in many parts of the world: as a student in New York and West Africa; a foreign service officer in Washington and Japan; a housewife in Papua New Guinea; and finally as a creative communicator responsible for global information themes for the United Nations Environment program in Nairobi, Kenya. She served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for many years. She is the recipient of the Chevalier de l’ordre national due Quebec and was honoured in Cleveland, Ohio with a “Mairuth Sarsfield Day.” Retired, Mairuth now lives in Ottawa.
Makeda Silvera was born in Jamaica and now lives in Canada. She is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. She is the editor of The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature and the groundbreaking Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology. In her first novel, The Heart Does Not Bend, Makeda explores the warmth and frustrations of mother-daughter relationships—and the conflict caused by a daughter becoming romantically involved with a woman.