In 1968, as protests shook France and war raged in Vietnam, the giants of Black radical politics descended on Montreal to discuss the unique challenges and struggles facing their brothers and sisters. For the first time since 1968, David Austin brings alive the speeches and debates of the most important international gathering of Black radicals of the era.

Against a backdrop of widespread racism in the West, and colonialism and imperialism in the “Third World,” this group of activists, writers, and political figures gathered to discuss the history and struggles of people of African descent and the meaning of Black Power.

With never-before-seen texts from Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, and C.L.R. James, Moving Against the System will prove invaluable to anyone interested in Black radical thought, as well as capturing a crucial moment of the political activity around 1968.

David Austin is the author of the Casa de las Americas Prize-winning Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, Moving Against the System:The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. He is also the editor of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James.

Radical activist, thinker, and comrade of Walter Rodney, Andaiye was one of the Caribbean’s most important political voices. For the first time, her writings are published in one collection. Through essays, letters, and journal entries, Andaiye’s thinking on the intersections of gender, race, class, and power are powerfully articulated, Caribbean histories emerge, and stories from a life lived at the barricades are revealed. We learn about the early years of the Working Peopl’s Alliance, the meaning asnd impact of the murder of Walter Rodney and the fall of the Grenada Revolution. Throughout, we bear witness to Andaiye’s acute understanding of politics rooted in communities and the daily lives of so-called ordinary people. Featuring forewords by Clem Seecharan and Robin DG Kelley, these texts will become vital tools in our own struggles to “overcome the power relations that are embedded in every unequal facet of our lives.”

Alissa Trotz is the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and Director of the undergraduate Caribbean Studies Program at New College at the University of Toronto.

Andaiye was a Guyanese social, political, and gender rights activist. She was an early member of the executive of the Working People’s Alliance, a founding member of the women’s development organization Red Thread in Guyana in 1986, and an executive member of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist * 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist

An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family.

Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness.

More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.

David Bradford is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.

2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Longlist * 2022 ReLit Awards Longlist

A visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site.

We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve—and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars—not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path.

Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person's power and ability—to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives.

here in the dark, me-space
i am insatiable for my flesh
i just can't get enough
of tiny after-wounds
that's me giving, still too soft
for my own teeth

Assiyah Jamilla Touré is a multidisciplinary artist of West African descent. They were born and raised on Skwxwú7mesh land and lived for many years in Kanien'kehà:ka territory (Montreal) and are now based on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Wendat (Toronto). In 2018 their chapbook feral was published by House House Press. Autowar is their first full-length collection.

A surrealist journey through alienation, lost dreams, and self-redemption

A woman loses her sister to suicide and struggles with the overwhelming and confusing feelings that continue to plague her. A man reflects on a decade spent working in a call centre and the strange day-to-day momentum that caused him to unconsciously abandon his goals. Helem relies on a propulsive graphic narrative and evocative illustration to tell the intensely personal stories of two characters at a crossroads.

The stories contained in Helem, originally published by TRIP as "Agalma" and "Sequences," delve deep into the internal lives of their characters. Helem, created while Wany was in a hallucinatory state brought on by a severe lack of sleep, also provides an intimate look into his own personal dreamscape.

Stanley Wany is an Afro-Canadian artist whose practice includes graphic novels, pen and ink drawings, and paintings. His works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, FInland, France, Portugal and in Australia. His first graphic novel, Agalma, was nominated in 2016 for a Doug Wright Award at the Toronto Comics and Arts Festival.

Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. This second testament--Canticles II (MMXIX) and Canticles II (MMXX)--issues re-readings--revisions, rewrites--of scriptures crucial to the emergent (Anglophone) African Diaspora in the Americas. Canticles II (MMXIX) follows Testament I (also issued in two parts--Canticles I (MMXVI) and Canticles I (MMXVII)) whose subject is History, principally, of slavery and imperialism and liberation and independence. Canticles II, the second part of a trilogy, is properly irreverent where necessary, but never blasphemous. It is scripture become what it always is, really, anyway: Poetry.

Acclaimed for his narrative lyric suites (Whylah Falls and Execution Poems), his lyric “colouring books” (Blue, Black, Red, and Gold), his selected poems (Blues and Bliss), his opera libretti and plays (Beatrice Chancy and Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path), George Elliott Clarke now presents us with his epic-in-progress, Canticles, a work that views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection. A native Africadian, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate ranges the atlas and ransacks the library to ink lines unflinching before Atrocity and unquiet before Oppression.

A g call to action and accountability. – Shelagh Rogers

Needless to say, moments like now, when the hurdles to becoming a respected author are at their lowest. When the only hurdles to being published are the quality of your writing and your patience to deal with certain less and less important gatekeepers. Moments in history like this, must be acknowledged and celebrated. That's what this anthology is: It's a celebration. A moment to cry out, “Look how many of us have a voice! There are stories, and poetry in this country that are about people like me! I am not alone!”

Dane Swan's second book, A Mingus Lullaby (Guernica Editions, 2016), was a finalist for the 2017 Trillium Book Prize for Poetry. A past Writer in Residence for the Open Book Foundation of Ontario, Dane has been short listed for the Monica Ladell Award (Scarborough Arts). His first book, Bending the Continuum (Guernica Editions, 2011), was a mid-summer recommended read from Open Book Toronto. Dane is the editor of Changing the Face of Canadian Literature: A Diverse Canadian Anthology. Dane is also an accomplished slam poet and touring spoken-word performer, placing second at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, third at the Rust Belt Regional Slam and touring the US Midwest and West Coast regions. He has graced numerous festival stages, including: IFOA, Hillside, Lab Cab, Parkdale Arts, Junction Arts, and Pitter Patter festivals. For four years Dane and Dan D'Onorio hosted Toronto's $100 Slam series. Mr. Swan's poetry has been taught in schools and has been published in France, the UK, Bahamas, and Canada.