The Adventures of A Black Girl in Search of God
From Governor General's Literary Award–winning playwright Djanet Sears comes a beautiful and deeply moving story set in present-day Negro Creek, a two-hundred-year-old black community in Western Ontario. Rainey Baldwin-Jackson, a country doctor, struggles to come to terms with the loss of her daughter, the disintegration of her marriage, and an eccentric elderly father on an […]
Harlem Duet
Winner of the Governor General's Award for Drama. Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. A rhapsodic blues tragedy. Harlem Duet could be the prelude to Shakepeare's Othello, and recounts the tale of Othello and his first wife Billie (yes, before Desdemona). Set in contemporary Harlem at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards, the play […]
Afrika, Solo
The plays in this anthology pit individual against community and cause readers to rethink the associations placed on skin colour, language, and assumptions regarding someone’s past.
The Outer Harbour
In his debut story collection, poet Wayde Compton explores the concept of place and identity in which characters and space merge to make narrative. These interconnected stories, imbued with the colour of speculative fiction, are towering in their conceits. As much as characters are revealed by what they do and say, in The Outer Harbour, […]
Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature
In the spring and summer of 1858, 600 blacks moved from San Francisco to the colonies that would eventually become British Columbia. The move was in part initiated by an invitation penned by the governor of the British colonies, James Douglas, who is commonly believed to have had African ancestry, a rumour he neither confirmed […]
Things Are Good Now
Set in East Africa, the Middle East, Canada, and the U.S., Things Are Good Now examines the weight of the migrant experience on the human psyche.
After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing and Religion
After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed Vancouver poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuoustwentieth century. It riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped […]