Discover Canada’s next generation of Black writers. For three decades The Journey Prize anthology has amplified the voices of emerging authors, and now the 33rd edition is focusing on those historically excluded by the publishing system, featuring short fiction chosen by acclaimed jurors David Chariandy (Brother), Canisia Lubrin (The Dyzgraphxst) and Esi Edugyan (Washington Black).

This historical fiction, set in mid-19th century Southern Ontario (and Underground Railroad points like Montreal, Detroit and Owen Sound, Ont.), is told from the perspective of a young Black journalist. It illuminates slavery refugee stories, which are told to her in the course of interviewing a woman arrested after escaping the U.S. It’s a smashing debut for the Ottawa born-and-raised Black author, descended from Trinidad and the British Isles, who tells foundational regional stories about the Black and Indigenous experience.

This California commercial photographer, who has spent more than a decade recreating iconic film images and scenes with a who’s who of Black celebrities (think: Vanessa Williams as Cleopatra, Blair Underwood in The Shining and Kel Mitchell as Forrest Gump), collects them in this coffee table book. It’s similar in concept, and just as thought provoking, as American visual artist Mikalene Thomas’s subversion of the so-called fine art canon, where she reimagines representation by inserting Black women into famous paintings in her photographs. Augustus has said in an interview he hopes to amend the glaring omission of Black representation in the mainstream media during Hollywood’s golden age.

Against the backdrop of racial strife, class conflict, early policing and surveillance of racialized residents, Whitzman – an Ottawa-based urban planning scholar – brings to life a spectacular 1894 Toronto true crime case: The trial and acquittal of Clara Ford, a Black woman who dressed as a man and confessed to murdering the scion of a wealthy white Toronto family.

Diets, daycare, debt and everyday racism — this anthology assembles some of the seasoned American cartoonist’s trailblazing comic strips of the early 1990s. The series, by the first nationally syndicated Black female cartoonist, traced the experiences of Black life and Black joy among several African-American women, and still resonates today. The New York Times recently sat down with Brandon-Croft to discuss her landmark comics. 

Whether she’s attending Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop summit or digging into unsound advice around body image, Wilson – a Sacramento dietitian and community organizer – unpacks and critiques the health and wellness industry’s systematic racist and sexist inequities in striking ways. Bestselling author and cultural critic Roxane Gay says Wilson’s examination of the ways Black women are left out of the conversation is a necessary read.

Commingling family history and firsthand insight with the politics of race, this bestselling personal essay about the lives of Black people in Canada and the United States from a leading Canadian scholar (who teaches political science at McGill University) was a finalist for the recent Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

As Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, Parker is also the last surviving witness to the lynching of the 14-year-old Chicago boy who was abducted, tortured and murdered in 1955 Mississippi. The racist atrocity galvanized public opinion and arguably set the Civil Rights movement in motion. Parker reckons with the pain of loss and survivor’s guilt in this blend of firsthand memories of what transpired that night with never-before shared investigative details, and reflects on a life spent advocating for racial justice and legal accountability.

It was the electrifying must-see exhibition in London last summer — the U.K.’s first dedicated to the work of imaginative Black artists (like Nick Cave, Cauleen Smith and Kara Walker) who incorporate fantasy, myth, sci-fi folklore and Afrofuturism as a way of seeing, dissolving the boundaries between the real and un-real, and re-envisioning identity. As curator Eshun writes in his introduction to the companion book based on the exhibit, it was inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness as “a prompt for Black people to imagine ourselves on our own terms.”

The Grammy Awards honoured the 50th anniversary of hip-hop with performances by influential figures from its past, present and future. But hip-hop has reshaped more than the music industry. This gorgeous coffee table book of images by top photographers documents and explores the meaning of the over-the-top bling worn by artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and A$AP Ferg, and how it transformed the jewelry industry over the course of a half-century, too. 

As part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games, Black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith created a moment of resistance seen around the world when they stepped onto the podium to accept their medals – wearing no shoes, beads and OPHR pins – then bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist in the air during the American anthem. Their goal was to express solidarity with oppressed Black people, protest lynchings and bring attention to Black poverty. This book, about Black athletes using their visibility for activism and social change, by a California expert on sport and social issues, considers the sport justice movement’s origins in the 19th century through to the Civil Rights movement and its revitalization in the age of #BlackLivesMatter.

Subtitled “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA,” this narrative from a Baltimore-based African-American history scholar is both a history of 1970s pro basketball that shaped the NBA and a corrective to assumptions about that era. (Mar. 7)