Afua Cooper book launches and upcoming readings

24 August 2006: University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica
23 Sept. 2006: Word on the Street, Toronto
12-17 Oct. 2006: Calgary-Banff, Canada, Literary Festival
18-19 Oct. 2006: Vancouver's Writers' Fest.
1-15 Nov. 2006: European Tour

Afua Cooper, Austin Clarke and Kamau Brathwaite

On Sunday, 23 July 2006, at the Summer Festival Reading Series sponsored by the Stephen Leacock Museum in the town of Orillia, I will be reading with renowned Caribbean and world poet Kamau Brathwaite. He just won the richest poetry prize in the world--The Griffin Prize. This will be a special event. Here is the context: distinguished Canadian, Caribbean and world author Austin Clarke will be hosting a dinner. The menu will be created by Clarke and will be taken from his bestseller Love and Sweet Food (American publication title) or Pig Tail and Roast Breadfruit (Canadian publication title). The thing is the menu will be Bajan. Austin is a food lover and a wicked cook. He too will be reading. I will be reading from my new book of poetry Copper Woman. So check the link www.leacockmuseum.com/images/LSFPlacemat.pdf
for more info.

Copper Woman

You are invited to an evening with the incomparable Afua Cooper as she launches her new book of poetry Copper Woman. This book speaks liberatory dub poetics which say equality and equity are possible and within reach. Copper woman invites us to cast off the chains and shackles that limit our insight, proclaim our freedom, and grasp a greater vision of the world. Allan Briesmaster describes Copper Woman as "incantatory, vivid, passionate, sensual and incendiary...a nourishment for the imagination."

Come hear Afua Cooper fresh from her tour of the best-selling and landmark book The Hanging of Angelique.

Special guests at the Copper Woman launch are the Dub Trinity Band, and dynamite poets Mel White, Strong, and Heron Jonse.
Sponsors: The Dub Poets Collective, Natural Heritage Press, and Writing Well

Place: The Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas West, 2 blocks west of Dufferin
Date: Thursday, 22 June 2006
Time: doors open 6p.m
Showtime: 7:30 sharp

$10 at the door/sliding scale
Info: Lula Lounge: 416 588 0307
Dub Poets Collective: 416 598 4932
Natural Heritage Press: 416 694 7907
Writing Well: 416 653 1220

The Hanging of Angelique

THE HANGING OF ANGELIQUE:
THE OLDEST SLAVE NARRATIVE IN THE NEW WORLD
(As seen in October 2005 issue of Essence Magazine)

Afua Cooper is an established writer of non-fiction, history, and poetry. She holds a Ph.D. in African-Canadian history with specialties in Slavery and Abolition. She also has expertise in Womens History and New France studies. She has contributed to several publications on the history of the African Diaspora in Canada and the Caribbean and is currently Professor of Black History and Women's Studies at the University of Toronto. Mrs. Cooper is also a recent winner of the Harry Jerome Award for Professional Excellence. For fifteen years, Mrs. Cooper has been researching the intriguing history of Marie-Joseph Angelique.

The Hanging of Angelique flips the script on the idea of Canada as a haven from slavery, yet this is also a story with international appeal. Angelique was Portuguese, and she had lived in what is now the United States. Her story resonates across time and space, back and forth across the Atlantic, traversing borders, language, race, and nations. Cooper's original research has assembled not only the first account of this story ever published in English, but also the first English-language histories of slavery in Canada and of the Atlantic Slave Trade that includes Canada.