Event Info
The Black Experience in Kingston
Presented by Kingston WritersFest
1:00pm - 2:00pm
$0-$21.69
Event Description
The Black Experience in Kingston
Britta Badour, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, with Tianna Edwards
Reading and Conversation
Islandview
1:00 – 2:00 pm
In her podcast (Kingston, The Black Experience) and blog (Keep Up with Kingston), Tianna Edwards challenges the narrative that Black people don’t live and create in this city. Join Tianna onstage with poet and scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and spoken word artist Britta Badour for a conversation on their work, and the inspiration and challenges that come with being an artist and creator in a smaller town.
Britta Badour
“Britta Badour uses the page as a canvas, sheet music. Poems that feel like songs. The collection invites readers to dance, light fires, and unlock the homes we are made of.” —Ian Keteku
Born and raised in Kingston, Britta Badour, better known as Britta B., is an award-winning artist, spoken word poet, performer, emcee, voice talent and mentor living in Toronto.
Britta has been a Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist and COCA Lecturer of the Year. Her work has been featured in print, in sound and onstage across North America in notable spheres such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, CBC Arts: Poetic License, The Walrus Talks, TEDx and The Stephen Lewis Foundation. As an educator, Britta facilitates artist-training seminars, poetry workshops and social justice programs in partnership with organizations like JAYU, Poetry in Voice, Prologue Performing Arts, and League of Canadian Poets.
Her debut poetry collection, Wires that Sputter, is a propulsive, intimate work with an eye toward Black liberations, pop culture, sports, and familial fractures. Brandon Wint says of the collection, “Britta Badour proves herself to be a poet unafraid to risk, unafraid to push the English language to its buoyant, confounding and sonically pleasurable limits. These poems testify to Britta’s faith in poetry as a mechanism for expansiveness, where the tensions between the spoken and unspoken, the revealed truth and the concealed (family) secret are exquisite, daring and capacious.” Britta holds a Creative Writing MFA from the University of Guelph and is a professor of spoken word performance at Seneca College.
Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her collection 100 Days, a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several prizes including the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Awards and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. “What makes this collection such a pleasure to read,” says a Huffington Post review, “is that it’s laced with moments of such grace that you have to pause and re-read the lines again in order to reflect upon each phrase….a masterpiece of uncommon splendour and Juliane Okot Bitek is a virtuoso performing at the height of her powers.” Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards for Poetry, and “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.
Her work has been published widely in publications such as Event, The Capilano Review, Room, and Arc, and anthologized in Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ups, Downs, Ins & Outs of Marriage, and Transition: Writing Black Canadas, amongst others. Her newest poetry collection, Song and Dread, offers COVID meditations rife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity. The poems remind us of community, connectedness, and the ways the strange can become normalized when there is no other option. Otoniya holds an MA in English, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC. She has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity, English, and Creative Writing at Queen’s University.
Tianna Edwards
Tianna Edwards grew up in Kingston, then moved to Toronto for a decade to study journalism and start a career as a content editor. She now works at Queen’s as an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Coordinator at Yellow House. She also runs Keep Up With Kingston, a blog that chronicles her adventures in the city she loves as she explores the latest tastes, sounds, and events popping up around Kingston. Tianna places a focus on locally owned establishments and her writing has taken her all over the Kingston area as she shares her favourite things about the limestone city with the world. A popular part of her blog is the growing list of Black-owned businesses she encourages her readers to support. It “encourages people to bring the February-ness all year round,” Tianna says.” People should keep these businesses in mind when they’re trying to find ways to support… It is not just about allyship, but [it] means that Black folks can see that Black people live in Kingston.”
Through her master’s in Cultural Studies, she asks who is telling the stories on Black culture, as well as the role of colonialism in pushing that narrative. Her graduate project is working on a podcast highlighting Black folks living in Kingston.
She lives in Kingston with her husband and two children.
In-Person Event
Sat. September 30th 2023 + Add to Calendar
Holiday Inn Kingston-Waterfront, an IHG Hotel
