1.
Series:
Beatdown
Three Plays
Paperback
Joseph Jomo Pierre
9780887548383
$17.95
DRAMA
Jul 01, 2006
Joseph Jomo Pierre's world is one of fatherless children, where boys turn to drugs and guns while girls turn to motherhood at the blink of an eye, where the colour of your skin dictates the course your life will take, where your brothers are as likely to pull you back down, as to help you get up. Includes: Born Ready a. k.a. Black on Both SideBeatDown a. k.a. LifePusha-Man a. k.a. The Seed
2.
Series: Semaphore
BlackLife
Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom
Paperback
Rinaldo Walcott
9781927886212
$15.00
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Jun 01, 2019
What does it mean in the era of Black Lives Matter to continue to ignore and deny the violence that is the foundation of the Canadian nation state? BlackLife discloses the ongoing destruction of Black people as enacted not simply by state structures, but beneath them in the foundational modernist ideology that underlies thinking around migration and movement, as Black erasure and death are unveiled as horrifically acceptable throughout western culture. With exactitude and celerity, Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott pull from local history, li...
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3.
Series:
Blank
Interviews and Essays
Paperback
M. NourbeSe Philip
9781771663069
$20.00
LITERARY CRITICISM
May 31, 2017
Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers.Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.In heretical writings that work to mak...
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4.
Series:
Canada's Forgotten Slaves
Two Centuries of Bondage
Paperback
Marcel Trudel
9781550653274
$27.95
HISTORY
Sep 15, 2013
Canada's Forgotten Slaves is a ground-breaking work by one of French Canada's leading historians, available for the first time in English. This book reveals that slavery was not just something that happened in the United States. Quite the contrary! Slavery was very much a part of everyday life in colonial Canada under the French regime starting in 1629, and then under the British regime right up to its official abolition throughout the British empire in 1834.By painstakingly combing through unpublished archival records of the seventeenth, eight...
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5.
Series: Essential Poets Series
Canticles I: (MMXVI)
Paperback
George Elliott Clarke
9781550719123
$25.00
POETRY
Aug 01, 2016
Book I of The Canticles puts into dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Marx can excoriate Queen Victoria. Book II will focus on Black folk readings of S...
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6.
Series: Essential Poets Series
Canticles I: (MMXVII)
Paperback
George Elliott Clarke
9781771831901
$25.00
POETRY
Mar 01, 2017
The second part of Book I of “The Canticles” continues the dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- of those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Marx can excoriate Queen Victoria. Book II will focus...
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7.
Series: Essential Poets Series
Canticles II: (MMXIX)
Paperback
George Elliott Clarke
9781771834094
$29.95
POETRY
Oct 01, 2019
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. I...
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8.
Series:
Dear Current Occupant
A Memoir
Paperback
Chelene Knight
9781771663908
$20.00
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Mar 01, 2018
Winner of the 2018 City of Vancouver Book AwardFrom Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative non-fiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.Using a variety of forms, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed Ea...
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9.
Series: None
Exile Blues
A Novel
Paperback
Gary Freeman
9781771862004
$24.95
FICTION
Nov 01, 2019
When Preston Downs, Jr., alias Prez, slides down the emergency chute onto the frozen tarmac at the Montreal airport, little does he know that returning home to Washington D.C. or to his adopted city, Chicago, would now be impossible. Events had sped by after a dust-up with the Chicago police. With a new name and papers, he finds himself in a foreign city where people speak French and life is douce compared to the one he fled. Son of a World War II vet, Prez grows up in the 50s in D.C., a segregated Southern city, and learns early that black li...
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10.
Series:
Descent into Night
Paperback
Edem Awumey
9781988449166
$22.95
FICTION
Nov 10, 2017
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, Translation, 2018 Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. From Goncourt Prize finalist Edem Awumey, a beautiful and brilliant new novel. With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced...
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11.
Series:
How Black Mothers Say I Love You
Paperback
Trey Anthony
9781770918023
$17.95
DRAMA
Nov 06, 2017
From the author of the blockbuster hit ‘da Kink in my hair comes an emotional and raw look into family dynamics, trust, resolution and change. Claudette still can’t forgive her mother for leaving. For six years of her childhood, Claudette and her sister Valerie were left with their grandmother while their mother, Daphne, moved from Jamaica to the United States to start a new chapter for their family. But in that time, Daphne remarried and had another daughter. Claudette, now in her late thirties, travels to visit her dying mother in Brooklyn, b...
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12.
Series:
My Totem Came Calling
Paperback
Blessing Musariri
9781988449753
$18.95
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
Grade (US) from 7 - 9
Sep 15, 2019
Chanda is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Harare, Zimbabwe, who suddenly starts suffering from memory lapses, which become even more worrisome when she starts seeing a zebra in all sorts of places. The trouble is, nobody else can see it. Afraid of being institutionalized in a hospital, she follows the advice of an old aunt and sets off for her ancestral village, a primitive settlement with none of the amenities she is used to in the city. But there she meets the rest of her family, including her strange and mysterious grandmother, and learns...
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13.
Series:
Nehanda
Paperback
Yvonne Vera
9781988449548
$22.95
FICTION
Nov 30, 2018
Introduction by M G Vassanji In the late nineteenth century white settlers and administrators arrive to occupy the African country of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). Nehanda, a village girl, is recognized through omens and portents as a saviour. The resulting uprising by the Africans is brutally crushed but looks forward to the war of independence that succeeded a century later. Told in lucid, poetic prose, this is a gripping story about the first meeting of a people with their colonizer.
14.
Series:
Other Side of the Game
Paperback
Amanda Parris
9781770919914
$17.95
DRAMA
May 21, 2019
I don’t think you can expect society to change if you’re not ready to take the first step. In the 1970s Beverly walks into an office of Black activists, wanting to join the Movement, and has to prove she’s committed enough to fight. Some forty years later, in the Hip Hop Generation, Nicole reunites with her ex-boyfriend on a basketball court, wondering where he’s been, when a police officer stops them. In this striking debut, Amanda Parris turns the spotlight on the Black women who organize communities, support their incarcerated loved ones, an...
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15.
Series:
Sound of the Beast
Paperback
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard
9780369100764
$17.95
DRAMA
Sep 21, 2020
"Compassion is good, but it’s just motivation. Cars need engines. Movements need mobilization." Through spoken word, storytelling and hip hop, acclaimed wordsmith Donna-Michelle St. Bernard illuminates racial discrimination, the suppression of expression and the trials of activism. Her experience as a Canadian emcee is woven through with allusion to Tunisian emcee Weld El 15’s unjust imprisonment for rhymes against a regime. This story creates a space to reflect on how we are connected to the systems that oppress us, and how we can empower each...
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16.
Series:
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road
Paperback
Kagiso Lesego Molope
9781988449449
$22.95
FICTION
Aug 24, 2018
Winner of the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019 Coming out in South Africa ... At what cost? All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father's practice. They also plan to give him the perfect township wedding. But Kabelo's one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come b...
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17.
Series:
Taximan
Stories and Anecdotes from the Back Seat
Paperback
Stanley Péan
9781988130897
$16.95
FICTION
Sep 01, 2018
In the taxi rides you're about to take, you'll be in the company of some classic drivers and of a perspicacious and sharp-eyed passenger, the writer and broadcaster Stanley Péan. Veteran translator David Homel, who introduced readers of English to Dany Laferrière with the publication of How to Make to Love to a Negro, now brings us the other major voice of Haitian Montreal: Stanley Péan, here in English for the first time.
18.
Series: Crow Said Poetry
Response of Weeds, The
A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies
Paperback
Bertrand Bickersteth
9781988732794
$18.95
POETRY
Apr 01, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award!Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for PoetryWinner of a 2021 High Plains Book Award for First Book!Finalist for the 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year!Finalist for a 2021 High Plains Book Award for PoetryBertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often ov...
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19.
Series:
The Seat Next to the King
Paperback
Steven Elliott Jackson
9781927922415
$15.95
DRAMA
Apr 01, 2018
In 1964, a white man walks into a public restroom in a Washington, DC park looking for sex. The next man who enters is a black man.The Seat Next to the King explores the lives of two men who literally sat next to the most powerful men in America. Bayard Rustin, a friend to Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizer of the March on Washington, and Walter Jenkins, top aide and friend to President Lyndon Johnson, meet in that restroom, although neither knows the other's identity yet. Each is a symbol of hope and change in 1964, and each is conflicte...
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20.
Series: Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series
The Talking Drum
Paperback
Lisa Braxton
9781771337410
$22.95
FICTION
May 01, 2020
Winner, 2020 National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Literary Award; Overall Winner, 2020 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Award; Winner, 2021 IPPY Gold Medal for Urban Fiction; Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year AwardsFeatured on Ms. Magazine's June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us and Bustle's 23 Debut Books That Are Too Good To Ignore. It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving...
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21.
Series:
Youth of God, The
Paperback
Hassan Ghedi Santur
9781988449739
$22.95
FICTION
Jun 01, 2019
Longlisted for Canada Reads, 2020 Finalist for the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019 The Youth of God tells the story of Nuur, a sensitive and academically gifted seventeen-year-old boy growing up in Toronto's Somali neighbourhood, as he negotiates perilously between the calling of his faith and his intellectual ambitions. Trying to influence him are a radical Muslim imam and a book-loving, dedicated teacher who shares his background. In its telling, this novel reveals the alienated lives of Somali youth in ...
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22.
Series:
This Book Betrays My Brother
Paperback
Kagiso Lesego Molope
9781988449296
$18.95
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
Grade (US) from 10 - 12
May 15, 2018
Winner of the Ottawa Book Award, English Fiction, 2019 Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018 Named to the Globe 100, 2018 CBC Books, Top YA Pick for 2018 Named to Best Books for Kids and Teens, Fall 2018 Named to Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best Books, 2018 What does a teenage girl do when she sees her beloved older brother commit a horrific crime? Should she report to her parents, or should she keep quiet? Should she confront him? All her life, Naledi has been in awe of Basi, her charming and outgoing older brother. They've s...
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23.
From the author of Cast Iron comes two plays that feature young black women who suddenly find themselves navigating unfamiliar territory on their own. As they embark on journeys from the only homes they’ve ever known, they’re challenged to think for themselves and to fight for what they want and believe in. In Up the Garden Path, Rosa, a young Barbadian seamstress, offers to pose as her brother to go to the Niagara Region in Ontario to work. There, she meets an aspiring actress obsessed with Joan of Arc, the ghost of a black Loyalist soldier wh...
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24.
Series:
What's a Black Critic To Do II
Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers
Paperback
Donna Nurse
9781554830299
$19.95
LITERARY CRITICISM
Oct 21, 2011
In What's a Black Critic to Do II, literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse once again gathers together profiles, reviews, interviews, and essays that examine race, culture, and multiculturalism through the lens of literature. This collection, featuring well-known writers, such as Lawrence Hill, Afua Cooper, Christopher Paul Curtis, Natasha Trethewey, Toni Morrison, David Chariandy, Joseph Boyden, and Kwame Dawes. What's a Black Critic to Do II is of especial interest to black readers as well as teachers, librarians, and book clubs. This companion to...
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25.
Series:
Why Don't You Carve Other Animals
Paperback
Yvonne Vera
9781988449555
$22.95
FICTION
Nov 30, 2018
The place is white-ruled Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) of the 1970s, the exile the African in his or her own land. Young men and women flee from their towns and villages to join the freedom fighters in the forests. These stories, set during the years of the armed struggle, tell of the other struggle, that of the survival and anxiety of those who stayed behind. Told essentially from the women's point of view, in lyrical but unaffected prose, the stories recreate the dark atmosphere of those months full of fear and hope. This new edition is introduced by...
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