Dr. Elaine Brown Spencer’s courageous play, adapted from her recently published book, breaks the silence and tackles issues in the Black church community members have ignored for too long.

Charlyn Ellis is a community outreach worker, creative writer and host of Covered and Bound at CHRY 105.5 Community Radio, a program dedicated to covering the boundless array of Canadian authors and literary visionaries. She is also a graduate of the Creative Writing program at York University who is working on a full-length collection of poems.

Sway interviews Pamela Mordecai, a Jamaican writer, teacher, and scholar and poet. She attended high school in Jamaica and college in the United States, where she did a first degree in English. A trained language-arts teacher with a PhD in English, she has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, trained teachers, and worked in media and in publishing.

I’m proudly a member of Canada’s spoken-word poetry community. Unfortunately, some members of the literary community have created fictional stereotypes of the poetry that spoken-word poets, particularly slam poets, are capable of writing. At the time I wrote Narcotics // Flora, the anti spoken-word rhetoric was at its loudest. I wanted to quietly make a point—that a slam poet could write eloquent, tight and structured poetry while keeping on message.

February is Black History Month, and the Toronto Public Library is proud to celebrate Black history and heritage with a series of readings, discussion groups, music and more.

Here is a guide to some literary highlights happening during the month of February at libraries across Toronto.

Canada: A “Post-Racial” Nation? Review of After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing and Region

A poem by Adebe DeRango Adem

It is always better to affirm and create awareness of the contributions made by Blacks in Canada and the U.S. as part of the larger project of recalling the pioneers who created these nations. Black History Month politicizes celebrations of diversity by recalling the very specific historical (as well as current) socio-political forces that shaped and influenced Black communities and identities.