Born in Belize, Joy Russell is a writer, poet and assistant producer for documentaries. She attended Simon Fraser University, studying contemporary dance, film, English and American Literature. She lived in London, England for many years, where she played in Afro-Bloco, a 15-piece Afro-Brazilian band and worked as a researcher, then as an assistant producer, on documentaries for Channel Four television. Her most current work includes Rebel Music: The Bob Marley Story, the three part series: Pump Up The Volume--a history of House Music, and The Hip Hop Years which was nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best arts documentary. She has written for Artspeak, a Vancouver artist run centre, and her writing has appeared most recently in The Fire People: A Collection of Contemporary Black British Poets (1998), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), and Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2001).

Russell, Tanya Evanson, Lorna Goodison and Wayde Comptom are among 90 contributors to the first national anthology of poetry by African Canadians, Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry (alpinebookpeddlers.ca $21.95), edited by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron, and launched during Black History Month in February of 2012. 978-1-897181-83-6

[BCBW 2012] "Belize"