Oral Histories

Wayde Compton is a Black Canadian writer/poet, DJ, and historian, born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. Compton has published two books of poetry: 49th Parallel Psalm, and Performance Bond. He has also edited an anthology, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, and recently a collection of essays entitled, After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region.

George Elliott Clarke is one of Canada’s most prolific poets. He is also a renowned essayist, scholar, playwright, and, in many ways, a songwriter. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the black Canadian community of Nova Scotia, creating a cultural geography that Clarke refers to as “Africadia.” Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1960, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, as a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi’Kmaq Amerindian heritage.

d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian dub poet, monodramatist, educator, and Dora Award-winning actor and playwright. In this month’s Oral History we are gifted with an on stage interview with d’bi.young, and we get to witness the power of dub poetry in action by one of Canada’s most renowned dub poets.

Cecil Foster is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals on issues of race, culture, citizenship, and immigration. Born in 1954, he became a journalist in Barbados before emigrating to Canada, where he began reporting for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. He worked as a senior editor for the Financial Post and in national radio news and national television news for CBC Toronto and for CTV News Network. Between 1979 and 1982, he was the editor of Contrast, Canada’s first Black-oriented newspaper.