Adebe D.A.
Adebe D.A. is a writer whose words travel between Toronto and New York. She recently completed her MA at York University, where she also served as Assistant Editor for the arts and literary journal, Existere. Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was published this year by Frontenac House, and subsequently longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under 30.
Adebe is interning at Open Book from January to May, 2011.
Recent Writer In Residence Posts
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on April 12, 2011 - 2:44pm
There I was, sitting in the sunlit dining room of the mixed-race, best-selling author (multiple use of hyphens not intended) of The Book of Negroes, when a sense of uncanny serendipity fell upon me. A sense that the very kind of writing I had done for so long—poetry, the language of metaphor and magic—took hold of the very environment I found myself, the moment in which Lawrence Hill, the Lawrence Hill we have all grown to respect as a one-of-a-kind author, was now sitting before me as a friend, even mentor, asking me if I preferred lemonade over water. Here we were, now, as fellow journeyers on the road of life.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on March 28, 2011 - 10:22am
It is arguable that our modern-day Elizabethan court is the coffeehouse stage, and our new veneration for the Tudor monarchy has switched to the necessity of a political mind and a fearlessness on the part of many poets to question the impact of "those on top". The intensity of our time is something we can no longer express in ornamental language; prose is still for many poets a weapon of choice, and while the beauty of language is still experimented with and valued in poetic works, it's more pc to be cool in the urban sense of the word than to go around spewing aristocratic notions of life, love, and loyalty.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on February 14, 2011 - 4:31pm
Poets love talking about love, and what better occasion than today to remind writers and readers of the authority of the heart and imagination, the beauty of natural phenomena, the experience of sublimity available to us on earth with every encounter.
I am not so much a romantic at heart as I am a Romanticist: a believer in the primacy of inspiration expressed in a Faustian aspiration after the sublime; a person who accepts contingency and spontaneity, intuition and feeling, the picturesque. I am nostalgic not for the old, but for the ever-changing present; I celebrate knowledge and what can be known, as well as the ambiguity of things, the possibilities that lay just ahead.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on January 31, 2011 - 5:00pm
Wherefore has the art of the literary salon gone? Wherefore the tasteful amusement of eavesdropping on crafty conversationalists, lounging about for the love of literature’s delights? Where does one go to see opinions dance and clash in testy gatherings of writerly egos? Literary salons, which flourished in France during the 17 and 18th centuries, seem antiquated by today’s standards, little more than languid parties for petty bourgeois readers, foreign assemblies in an era pulsed by tweets and text.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on January 27, 2011 - 12:24pm
Inanna Publications, 2010
Adebe D.A. writes...
Co-edited by Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out is an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, as well as black and white artwork and photography that explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century.
Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. The anthology offers creative as well as critical ways to examine interraciality against shifting aesthetic, critical, and cultural conventions and values attributed to race in the last several decades.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on January 27, 2011 - 12:19pm
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010
Adebe D.A. writes...
After Canaan, the debut collection of essays on Canada’s interracial histories by poet and scholar Wayde Compton, is a refreshing remix of scholarly and poetic investigations into the various national myths that have dubbed Canada a “post-racial” nation. With a focus on interracial relations in British Columbia, Compton’s book uncovers the uncomfortable place race continues to have in our national discourses and history books.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on January 21, 2011 - 7:02pm
The rise of digital reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook have marked a turn towards literature that's user-friendly. These devices, and a slew of others now on the market, allow readers to download content without a computer and take their library with them. The Kindle, a device most of us are at least familiar with by name, holds approximately 250 MB of memory (which adds up to about 200 non-illustrated titles). You can "bookmark," highlight, look up content, and "save clippings" as you go - a godsend for travelers and environmentalists.
But for neo-Luddites and tree lovers in the opposite sense - that is to say, scholars, ex-beatniks, and hardcover aficionados - the Kindle means the book has officially been extinguished.
Submitted by Adebe D.A. on January 20, 2011 - 5:16pm
The historic Bakka Phoenix Books has risen once again.
Canada’s oldest science fiction and fantasy book store, Bakka Phoenix Books, has found a new home at 84 Harbord.
Bakka Phoenix first opened its doors in 1972 on Queen Street, relocated for a short stint on Yonge, and in 2003, moved back once again to the merchant community of Queen West.
The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.
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