In 2020, Chantal Gibson's debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin, $20) won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award presented annually, since 1981, to honour Vancouver poet Pat Lowther whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975 when she was killed by her husband who resented her success. Presented to a female poet, the award carries a $2000 prize and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It also won the 2020 BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. How She Read represents the voices of Black women, past and present, highlighting the colonial ideas embedded in everyday things such as storybooks, coloured pencils, paintings and postage stamps. It was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (which recognizes a first book of poetry published by a Canadian writer); the Raymond Souster Award (presented annually for a book of poetry by a Canadian League of Poets member); and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

with/holding, the follow-up to How She Read, is a collection of genre-blurring poems that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for a daily diet of Black suffering.

Gibson is an artist-educator living in Vancouver with ancestral roots in Nova Scotia. She teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University. Her work has been published in Room magazine and Making Room: 40 years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017), and she was shortlisted for PRISM magazine's 2017 Poetry Prize.

BOOKS:

How She Read (Caitlin, 2019) $20 978-19879-1596-9

with/holding (Caitlin, 2021) $20 978-1-77386-062-6

Photo by Dale Northey.

[BCBW 2021]