A beautiful, poetic argument for learning to understand the things that frighten us, "The Thing About Bees" centers on a father's relationship with his son as he explains why bees--the objects of the boy's fear--are so important to people and to the world. It is a book written to inspire wonder by author and fine artist Shabazz Larkin, writing with "an unconditional love" for both his son and the bees.
Joseph Coehlo grew up in the last village in London - Roehampton. “I don’t recall wanting to be a writer when I was little. '' Joseph says, “Writers were special people who existed elsewhere… they didn’t exist in Roehampton.” His earliest memory of writing a poem was from when he was in grade three. “There was a poetry competition. I wrote a poem about the life of a performing bear, chained and made to dance… it was titled “Unbearable” alas the judges were not that impressed.” Despite his loss in the competition Joseph continued to write. At university he studied archaeology but despite spending a lot of his time in a different field Joseph still wrote poems and even started directing and writing plays. His career is as illustrious and varied as his poetry. One day Joseph discovered a poetry course at Battersea Arts Centre. He continued writing and performing his poetry, one day dreaming of becoming a published author. His very first poetry collection Werewolf Club Rules was published in 2014 and he has been steadily writing and performing ever since.
Alootook Ipellie was an Inuit poet born in Nuvuqquq on Baffin Island, in what is now known as Nunavut. Throughout his youth, Ipellie moved all around the country to live with family members and in foster homes. Despite his incredible talent, he was discouraged from pursuing artistic studies in high school. He went on to become an internationally known journalist, Inuktitut translator, graphic artist, and cartoonist. Issues of colonialism, spirituality, and the navigation of cultural identity are threaded throughout his work. Ipellie died of a heart attack in 2007.
Haitian-Canadian poet Junie Désil grew up with immigrant parents in Montreal, and now lives in British Columbia. Her work in this book explores the experience of blackness as it relates to sovereignty, using the metaphor of the Haitian zombie. The violence of the ocean crossing and enslavement are countered by a "cure", implied in the collection's title, and the powerful language of Désil's poetry itself.
The poem "Mute" by Celine Tsai explores the idea behind the written character of "mute" in Chinese, which combines the symbols for "mouth" and "Asian" together. Through this image, Tsai explores the implications this has had on her and the struggles she has experienced through speaking out against racism and stereotypes. Though "Mute" begins with Tsai's observation that she learned to stay quiet as a child, it ends with a call to unlearn this habit and for the reader to use the voice they have to amplify themselves and others. "Mute" was recently published in Vancouver Poetry House's Cotyledon anthology.
Celine Tsai is a Taiwanese Canadian slam poet who began her journey at a youth poetry slam event in Vancouver's Cafe Deux Soleil in 2017. Throughout university, Tsai continued to write and perform her poetry at slam competitions, at TEDx events, and a conference hosted by Jack.org where she was the closing speaker after the mayor of Kingston. She was also the recipient of the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award for her volunteer work. In September 2023, she plans to begin her JD at the University of Toronto.
In "The Land Bridge Theory", poet Angel Zhao writes about the culture shock she experienced through the process of immigrating from China to Canada at a young age. Through beautifully crafted imagery and line breaks that mirror the flow of the passage of time, Zhao explores all manner of turbulent waters that immigrants must bridge by journeying to a new country which include foreign foods, new holidays, and having to understand a new literary canon. "The Land Bridge Theory" won second place in the League of Canadian Poets' national 2022 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize competition.
Angel Zhao is a Chinese Canadian poet whose work has also been featured in the ISABC's Ariadne anthology, Pluvia literary magazine's website, and BASA's Firecracker anthology. Additionally, her short film Teenage Homage was a runner up in The New York Times' 2021 Coming of Age multimedia contest.
Joseph Coehlo grew up in the last village in London - Roehampton. “I don’t recall wanting to be a writer when I was little. '' Joseph says, “Writers were special people who existed elsewhere… they didn’t exist in Roehampton.” His earliest memory of writing a poem was from when he was in grade three. “There was a poetry competition. I wrote a poem about the life of a performing bear, chained and made to dance… it was titled “Unbearable” alas the judges were not that impressed.” Despite his loss in the competition Joseph continued to write. At university he studied archaeology but despite spending a lot of his time in a different field Joseph still wrote poems and even started directing and writing plays. His career is as illustrious and varied as his poetry. One day Joseph discovered a poetry course at Battersea Arts Centre. He continued writing and performing his poetry, one day dreaming of becoming a published author. His very first poetry collection Werewolf Club Rules was published in 2014 and he has been steadily writing and performing ever since.
Celia Berrell is a Science Rhymes poet. She regularly contributes verses for Australia’s CSIRO children’s science magazine Double Helix and Australian Children’s Poetry. Celia learns scientific facts and creates short rhyming verse inspired by her newfound knowledge. She gives poetry presentations, collects science poems from around the world and runs her website Science Rhymes where you can find more poems like this.
Born in Los Angeles, and now a professor of English in Iowa, Donica Kelly’s work in gender studies and poetry has influenced her writing in both academic and poetic fields. Her poetry collections include Bestiary and more recently, The Renunciations, reviewed as “a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories”.
An editor and a writer of speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson first burst onto the scene in the late 1990s with Brown Girl in the Ring. Since then, she has published five more novels and two short story collections, as well as editing a collection of Post-Colonial SF called So Long Been Dreaming. Midnight Robber imagines a planet called Toussaint, it's relationship to a prison planet called "New Half-Way Tree" and a mythical figure named Tan-Tan--the titular robber queen and her strange adventures.
Fans of Rick Riordan and MARVEL's Black Panther will love Tristan Strong Punches A Hole In the Sky. An action-packed adventure straddling our world and the enchanted realms of myth, author Kwame Mbalia tells the story of seventh-grader Tristan Strong, who must battle the forces of evil alongside heroes from African-American folklore and gods like Anansi the Weaver. Using his skills as a boxer and a storyteller, can Tristan find a way to close the deadly hole between worlds that he accidentally opened?
Writing prompt: Portals to other worlds come in all shapes and sizes--doorways, mirrors, wardrobes, enchanted paintings, rabbit holes, storms--and, of course, holes in the sky! Describe an object or place that you think could be a portal to another world. How would you use this portal? Where would it take you?
In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, thousands of African American children volunteered to march for their civil rights after hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. They protested the laws that kept black people separate from white people. Facing fear, hate, and danger, these children used their voices to change the world. Frank Morrison's emotive oil-on-canvas paintings bring this historical event to life, while Monica Clark-Robinson's moving and poetic words document this remarkable time.
In this debut series of essays, Tajja Isen tackles topics from colour-blind casting in the animation industry to the literary industry's pursuit of diversity to the false illusion of progress that social media justice results in when it comes to addressing racism. At times both darkly comic, sharply observant, and necessarily tragic, Some of My Best Friends combines Isen's lived experiences as a voice actor and a person of colour with critiques about what society says, values, and does and the obliviousness and hypocrisy behind those messages and actions.
Tajja Isen is a Gemini Award winning Canadian voice actor whose credits range from The Berenstain Bears, Time Warp Trio, and the titular character in Atomic Betty. As a younger actress, she was nominated for a Young Artist Award for her work in The Berenstain Bears and won for her role in Jane and the Dragon. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine.
In the second of a triology, Maizon, a scholarship student, is one of five black students at an exlcusive school in Connecticut. Overcoming feeling like an outcast, Maizon decides to friend no one as she really does not fit in with either side. Through the sensitivity of some students, and loneliness overriding her decison to find a place where she can feel like she belongs, this story embarks on her journey.
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children and adolsecent audiences. Her National Book Award Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming and her Newbery Honor winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018-2019. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. In the same year, she was named a McArthur Fellow.
Rio Cortez is a New York Times bestselling author for her picture book The ABCs of Black History and The River Is My Sea. this August, Golden Ax, her debut poetry collection, is going to be from Penguin Poets.Cortezz was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah however she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem. She works in sales and marketing at Harper Collins, where her goal is to amplify the voices and opportunities for BIPOC writers in the day.She also works at the Schomburg Cneter for Research in Black Culture. She attended Sarah Lawurence for her undergrad and then NYU where she reiveed her MFA in poetry. She's been living with her fammily in her husband's hometown of Harlem, New York.
Starting as a social media challenge for her followers to examine the inherent biases and prejudices that they held as white people, Me and White Supremacy became a 28-day workbook of writing and reflection exercises for readers to tackle. Divided into three parts, the book covers "The Basics" before tackling "Anti-Blackness, Racial Stereotypes, and Cultural Appropriation", before concluding with a section on "Allyship".
Me and White Supremacy has been downloaded over 100,000 times since its inception. Layla F. Saad has a Bachelor of Laws from Lancaster University and is the current host of the Good Ancestor podcast.
Mychal Wynn is a CEO, father, and author. He promotes equity and access in communities. He grew up poor and was out up for adoption early into his life. In this poem, he writes about the impermanence of life and the challenges, changes, and adversity that you will experience.
Born to a military family in Cleveland, Ohio, Marilyn Nelson started her career as a poet in her elementary school. Her father was one of the last to graduate from Tuskegee Airmen, primarily African American military pilots and airmen who fought in World War II. Marilyn is an author and translator for over 20 books for children and grownups. She was a Poet Laureate of Connecticut (2001-2006). Nelson’s work is described as “examining complex issues around race, feminism, and the ongoing trauma of slavery in American life in narratives poised between song and speech.” Her book The Homeplace (1990) depicts her family’s history dating back to the sale of Nelson’s great-great-grandmother into slavery.
Aria loves her hair. It's soft and bouncy, and grows up toward the sun like a flower.
But what will Aria do when curious hands can't resist touching her curls?
Sharee Miller lives and works in Jersey City with her husband and their two cats, Pumpkin and Spice. Her illustrations combine bright colors, patterns, and expressive characters to tell the stories she wishes she had as a kid.
(Warning: Poem contains mature language)
In her powerful and poignant slam poem, White Privilege, Kyla Jenee Lacey explores both the obvert and subtle privileges that white people experience on a day-to-day basis that BIPOC do not. Through repetition, alliteration, and rhetorical questions for the audience, Lacey demonstrates the inherent contradications and logical fallacies that lead to white people being able to navigate society with ease, but disenfranchise and strip Black people of agency or power. There are few better examples of poems that lay out in plain terms the types of prejudices that Black people have to experience day-to-day that white people would never have to conceive of experiencing.
Kyla Jenee Lacey is an accomplished slam poet whose work has been viewed more than 50 million times on the Internet. She has spoken at over 300 post secondary institutions in over 40 states and has written for publications like Huffington Post, BET.com, and Root magazine.