3 Black Canadian writers to watch in 2024
Ryan B. Patrick shares CBC Books' Black Canadian writers to watch list with Ali Hassan
To honour Black History Month, The Next Chapter contributor Ryan B. Patrick curated a list of Black Canadian writers to watch and read.
He spoke with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan about the three authors he wants to pay attention to in 2024.
Britta Badour
Britta Badour, better known as Britta B., is a spoken word artist and author based in Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation and 2021 Writer of The Year from the Canadian Organization of Campus Activities. She teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College.
"Wires That Sputter connects who she is in terms of what she looks like and what she does to the world that she lives in.
"If you've seen her spoken word poetry it's electric, it's vibes, it's powerful. The book captures that live performance, that musicality, that lyrical feel on the page with such a poetic power," said Patrick.
Badour's debut poetry collection, Wires That Sputter, explores pop culture, sports, family dynamics and Black liberation. She discusses her lived experience as a Black mixed-race woman who grew up in Kingston, Ont.
"When I think about what it means to be free, what it means to have liberation and be Black, it is evolving with this knowledge of history in mind and hopefully getting to a space where our Blackness is able to care for itself more," Badour told The Next Chapter in 2023.
Sarah Everett
Currently based in Alberta, Sarah Everett is the author of several books for teens. The Probability of Everything won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text. Her YA and middle grade books include Some Other Now, How to Live Without You and No One Here is Lonely.
The Probability of Everything follows Kemi Carter, a 11-year-old girl who dreams of being a scientist. With her love for probability, she calculates that an asteroid has a high probability of hitting the Earth in four days. Over the four days, she feels like the world is ending as she navigates moving into a new neighbourhood and her relationships with her family members.
"You have this ticking time bomb, this asteroid hurtling towards Earth. But it's really about the genre conventions of the middle-grade novel in terms of exploring race, exploring identity and exploring what it means to be in a family," Patrick said.
Matthew R. Morris
Matthew R. Morris is a writer, advocate and educator based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Black Boys Like Me is his first book. Morris was recently announced as one of the readers for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Black Boys Like Me is a collection of eight essays that examine his own experiences with race and identity throughout his childhood into his current work as an educator. The child of a Black immigrant father and a white mother, Morris was influenced by the prominent Black male figures he saw in sports, TV shows and music while growing up in Scarborough, Ont. While striving for academic success, he confronted Black stereotypes and explored hip hop culture in the 1990s.
"I think that's a topic that hasn't been explored to any depth in a nonfiction context. It's about the school system which has historically held back Black people. He explores that as eight illuminating essays that are constructed like a mixtape and he grapples with these questions in terms of identity and perception.
"He was a football star in high school. He explores what it means to be a Black boy into sports, pop culture, education, and it looks at how Black men consume this content and are often consumed by it. It's a very rich text. It asks very timely questions about what it means to be Black in today's world," added Patrick.
In an interview with The Next Chapter last month, Morris spoke about not feeding into the gatekeeping that he sees with literature around Blackness, where some people assert a full understanding of the Black experience.
"It's very hard to claim an expertise in understanding what it means to exist as a Black man. So for me, I'm merely speaking, not from the inside looking out or from the outside looking in — I'm taking my position in the dead centre and just looking around," Morris said.
Ryan B. Patrick's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
