Repost of CBC Books  Black History Month: 6 Black Canadian Writers to Watch in 2019​ by Ryan B. Patrick.

​In honour of Black History Month, CBC Books is highlighting six Canadian authors of black heritage who are making their mark on the national literature scene. 

Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based author. (House of Anansi Press)Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based author. Lauded by George Elliott Clarke as a 'writer to watch', Reid-Benta explores race, identity and culture through the lens of second-generation Caribbean Canadians in her work. The Columbia MFA gradudate's debut novel Frying Plantain is a series of interconnected stories featuring a young black female protagonist in West end Toronto neighbourhood. Frying Plantain is set for a spring 2019 release.

Whitney French is an writer, editor and literacy advocate. (Whitney French)Whitney French is a writer, storyteller and educator. Her self-published poetry collection 3 Cities came out in 2012. Her latest work is Black Writers Matter, an anthology of African Canadian writing — edited and curated by French — which features a cross-section of established and emerging authors. Mentored by author David Chariandy, French also has several literary works in development. 
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Chantal Gibson is a Vancouver-based author, poet and educator. (Dale Northey)Vancouver-based Chantal Gibson is a artist, poet and educator. Her 2019 book How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of black women in Canada from a cultural perspective. With ancestral roots in Nova Scotia, Gibson's literary approach is dedicated to challenging imperialist ideas by way of a close look at Canadian literature, history, art, media and pop culture.

Kaie Kellough is a Montreal-based author, novelist and poet. (Marie-Claude Plasse)Kaie Kellough is a Montreal-based poet, novelist, and self-described "word-sound systemizer." His experimental novel Accordéon explores the intersection of French and English culture and was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2017. Kellough was a 2018 CBC Short Story Prize reader and released the poetry collection Magnetic Equator in 2019.

Ben Philippe is a Montreal-raised writer based in New York. (HarperCollins)Ben Philippe is of Haitian descent, was raised in Montreal and is now based in New York. Philippe has an MFA in fiction and screenwriting, has contributed to publications like Vanity Fair, The Guardian and Playboy and in 2019 released his debut YA novel, The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, about a wisecracking black French Canadian teenager who moves to to Austin, Texas.

Sarah Raughley is an author of fantasy novels. (Melanie Gillis)Sarah Raughley is a fantasy novelist from Southern Ontario. Raughley's recently completed YA Effigies series, which includes Fate of Flames, Siege of Shadows and Legacy of Light, involves four young women are imbued with the powers of the four elements and tasked with protecting the world from the evil Phantoms. Her forthcoming fantasy book, The Bones of Ruins, features a black protagonist in Victorian England.

Ryan B. Patrick · Posted: Feb 06, 2019 12:25 PM ET | Last Updated: February 7

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​The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

​Following on from his first novel (The Gift of Rain, 2007) in much the same style, Tan Twang Eng offers up this masterfully-sculpted narrative with all his trademark mysticism and esoteric turns of phrase. In a setting that could easily be the subject of an ink-and-wash painting by the ancient master, Sesshu Toyo, the reader is plunged into a retrospective unraveling of 1950s Malaya, as the British colonialists vie for control of the misty highlands with the Chinese communists. The impetus to action is the respective exile and animosity from and for Japan of the central characters, which slowly evolves into a redemptive dynamic, manifesting through art and the romantic serenity of nature all around.

Repost from CBC Books feature 'David Chariandy on what it's like having his novel Brother on Canada Reads'  Posted: Feb 15, 2019 

David Chariandy is an award-winning Vancouver-based author. His latest novel, Brother, is the story of two brothers growing up in a troubled housing complex in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.
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Brother won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2018 Toronto Book Award.
Now it's a contender for Canada Reads 2019, where it will be defended by Lisa Ray. The debates take place March 25-28, 2019. ​​

Chinese Canadians are one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. Despite their importance to the Canadian economy, including the historic construction of the CPR, many European Canadians were hostile to Chinese immigration, and a prohibitive head tax restricted immigration from 1885 to 1923. From 1923 to 1947, the Chinese were excluded altogether from immigrating to Canada. While 1 July is celebrated as Canada Day, some Chinese Canadians refer to that date as "National Humiliation Day." This is because the Chinese were the only ethnic group ever to be excluded from emigrating to Canada.
​For more, check out The Canadian Encyclopedia's feature on Chinese-Canadians
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Anna Yin is Mississauga’s first Poet Laureate (2015-2016) and Ontario representative for the League of Canadian Poets (2013-2016). She has authored six books of poetry and her poems have appeared at ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, World Journal etc. Anna won many awards including the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTY Literary Arts Awards and 2013 Professional Achievement Award from CPAC. Her poem “Still Life” was part of Poetry in Transit featured on buses across Canada in 2013. She read her poetry on Parliament Hill and has been featured at 2015 Austin International Poetry Festival and 2016 Edmonton Poetry Festival. Anna has been interviewed by CBC Radio, Rogers TV and Talent Vision TV, The Toronto Star and China Daily several times. She was a finalist for Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants Award in 2011 and in 2012, and is proud to be twice a “Living book” for the Living Library at the Mississauga Campus of University of Toronto.  Read more of Anna's story via her Passages to Canada profile

What do a musician, a model, a science journalist, an actor and a fashion guru have in common? They are all panellists for Canada Reads 2019. Over four days in March, the five defenders will bring their diverse perspectives to this year's theme: One Book to Move You.

The contenders and their chosen books are:

• Chuck Comeau defending Homes by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah with Winnie Yeung
• Lisa Ray defending Brother by David Chariandy
• Ziya Tong defending By Chance Alone by Max Eisen
• Yanic Truesdale defending Suzanne by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated by Rhonda Mullins
• Joe Zee defending The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong

See a book you love? Ask a librarian. If we don't have it, we can try to get it for you. xo CCI Library.

Toni Morrison Biographical
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain (Ohio), the second of four children in a black working-class family. Displayed an early interest in literature. Studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University, Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University. She has also worked as an editor for Random House, a critic, and given numerous public lectures, specializing in African-American literature. She made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America. A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

Morrison has written eleven novels and countless other essays, nonfiction books, plays, children’s fiction, and even a libretto. She was the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature, and won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She is a novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and a professor emeritus at Princeton University.

From https://bookriot.com/2018/05/15/toni-morrison-books/

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​“YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING.”
AND OTHER WRITING ADVICE FROM TONI MORRISON

The Bluest Eye
​Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

Beloved is arguably Morrison’s most famous or classic book. It’s about the post-slavery life of Sethe, a mother who was a slave at a place called Sweet Home, about a baby named Beloved, and about a daughter named Denver. Morrison was inspired by the tale of Margaret Garner, a woman who killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be put back into slavery, and about the argument that ensued—the abolitionists wanted her hanged, because she was a person capable of murder, while the slave owners argued that she was only property, and so should be returned to her owner. She combined that tale with a vision of a woman on a tree stump that she saw one day from her window to write this tale of loss and longing.

Jazz
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the centre: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish....
Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother ... Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother ... and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
* book synopses from amazon.ca