7 Black B.C.-based authors to read this Black History Month — and beyond

Harrison Mooney

Harrison Mooney is an award-winning writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, the Guardian, Yahoo and Macleans. He was also the Vancouver Public Library’s 2022 Writer-In-Residence.

Mooney’s memoir, Invisible Boy, tells the story of his adoption into a white, evangelical family and growing up in a white, conservative household in Abbotsford, about 71 kilometres east of Vancouver. 

“I wanted other kids who grew up in the same situation as me, other kids who were displaced, trans-racial adoptees, children in the foster system, marginalized people in general to to feel represented and to see that that story of being plucked from one place and dropped into another family, usually a white Christian family, is not a singular story,” Mooney said.

“I’m willing to tell this story, get out in front of it and start this conversation so that we can all feel like we exist a little bit more.” 

Chelene Knight

Chelene Knight is a writer and poet, and the author of the poetry collection Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, which won the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her work has appeared in literary magazines in Canada and the U.S. and she has served as a judge for literary awards, including the B.C. Book Prize.

Junie, Knight’s first novel, follows the story of a curious and observant child who moves with her mother to Hogan’s Alley, a thriving Black immigrant community in 1930s Vancouver. As she grows into adulthood, Junie explores her artistic talents and sexuality as her mother falls into an alcohol addiction, and the once-thriving neighbourhood begins to change. 

“Junie — she’s a character, a character I had in my head for my whole life,” Knight said.

“I’ve always been trying to find a home for her, I’ve tried to put her in in poetry, I’ve tried to write essays about her, I’ve tried to do all these different things that just didn’t work.

“So when I learned about Hogan’s Alley, this beautiful community that was demolished in the late ’60s, early ’70s when we put in the Georgia Viaduct, I heard Junie getting louder in my head and it was almost like she was telling me to drop her off there.”

Junie Désil

Junie Désil is a poet of Haitian descent who was born in Montreal, raised in Winnipeg and now lives in British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Room and Prism. 

eat salt | gaze at the ocean is her first book, a poetry collection, that explores the themes of Black and Haitian sovereignty, and Black lives, using the Haitian zombie as a metaphor for the condition and treatment of Black bodies.

“I’m writing about zombies metaphorically and also not metaphorically. Zombies are part of Haitian culture, and so one of the ways to get out of being a zombie or to become reanimated is to either eat salt or to look at the ocean,” Désil said.

“And so I decided that’s going to be my title. But I also didn’t want my collection to have a narrative arc of, ‘oh, here’s all the terrible stuff, here’s the middle, and here’s the redemption’ because, really, what I was trying to say is that we live in this condition as Black folks, kind of like that liminal space of alive and dead. So, yes, there we could eat salt and gaze at the ocean but I suspect that that’s not enough.”

Cecily Nicholson

Cecily Nicholson is a poet and author originally from Ontario, now based in British Columbia. She is the author of four books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Nicholson is also a former Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University and Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor. She currently teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Her most recent poetry collection, HARROWINGS, includes fragments of Nicholson’s own story of growing up on a farm, as well as more recent pandemic experiences at a local agricultural enterprise. 

“I think about it as a study of Blackness in rurality. It connects two experiences — one is my own experience growing up on a farm in rural community for the first 15 years of my life and connects it to recent experience during this pandemic volunteering at a farm,” Nicholson said.

“It’s a green space that supports people who are incarcerated or recently released as an opportunity for them to be out on land.”

Robert Joseph Greene

Robert Joseph Greene is a Vancouver-based author who writes gay romance fiction. He became an unlikely participant in Russia’s LGBTQ human rights protests in 2017 when one of his short stories, The Blue Door, was translated into Russian.

The Counting of Sins, Greene’s most recent novel, follows the story of Baxter Holm, a gay man living in New Jersey in the 1920s who has to deal with his homosexual desires while choosing between two men. 

“I was reading all about this chivalry and gallantry and heterosexual stories, heterosexuals have this advantage of having all this material to draw on to help their relationships. I wanted gay men to dream away romantic relationships for themselves,” Greene said.

Valerie Mason-John

Valerie Mason-John is a poet, author and public speaker living on the Sunshine Coast, whose writing brings light to the scars and trauma of slavery, sexism and colonization.

Mason-John’s latest book, Afrikan Wisdom, is an anthology of wisdom stories from Black liberation leaders and teachers. Her poetry collection I Am Still Your Negro focuses on ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization.

“I Am Still Your Negro is a homage to James Baldwin. That was me being a political activist through my writing, it really came out of all the before George Floyd,” Mason-John said.

“But there were so many young Black men and Black women who had been slaughtered by the police, and not just in the U.S., but in Canada and in the U.K. I straddle all those three places and I got to point where I just thought, I don’t wanna wake up and hear that another Black person has been killed by the police.”

Cicely Belle Blain

Cicely Belle Blain is a poet and activist from Vancouver, and the founder of Black Lives Matter Vancouver. 

CBC Radio named them one of 150 Black women and non-binary people making change across Canada in 2018. 

Their debut poetry collection, Burning Sugar, explores Black identity, history and the impact of colonization on Black bodies. CBC Books named Burning Sugar one of the best Canadian poetry books of 2020.

“I wanted to explore the complexity I experience when travelling in terms of being privileged to have the opportunity to travel,” Blain said, “but then also complexities being a person of colour, being a Black person, being a plus-size person, being queer.”

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.