Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature

by George Elliott Clarke (Editor)

Mixing prose, poetry, and drama, and including the work of established writers and new voices, writing in English as well as French (in translation here), Eyeing the North Star is a varied and vibrant overview of the recent evolution of African-Canadian Literature.

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 1997

About the author

A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.

Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)