Commodore Books
Commodore Books is the first Black Canadian literary press in Western Canada. Founded in 2006 by Wayde Compton, Karina Vernon and David Chariandy, this press is dedicated to publishing work relevant to black people in Canada. ''Adventures in Debt Collection'', by Vancouver-based author Fred Booker, is Commodore's inaugural title. Addena Sumter-Freitag's play ''Stay Black and Die'', an account of growing up black in Winnipeg during the 1950s and 1960s, is Commodore's second title. The company takes its name from the Commodore, a paddle steamer which transported British Columbia's first black settlers from San Francisco to Victoria during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, (also Fraser Gold Rush and Fraser River Gold Rush) began in 1858 after gold was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River a few miles upstream from the Thompson's c .... External links Commodore Books Web site Book publishing com ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Black Canadian
Black Canadians (also known as Caribbean-Canadians or Afro-Canadians) are people of full or partial sub-Saharan African descent who are citizens or permanent residents of Canada. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean origin, though the Black Canadian population also consists of African-American immigrants and their descendants (including Black Nova Scotians) and many native African immigrants. Black Canadians have contributed to many areas of Canadian culture. Many of the first visible minorities to hold high public offices have been Black, including Michaëlle Jean, Donald Oliver, Stanley G. Grizzle, Rosemary Brown, and Lincoln Alexander. Black Canadians form the third-largest visible minority group in Canada, after South Asian and Chinese Canadians. Population According to the 2006 Census by Statistics Canada, 783,795 Canadians identified as Black, constituting 2.5% of the entire Canadian population. Of the black population, 11 per cent identified as mixed-race o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Western Canada
Western Canada, also referred to as the Western provinces, Canadian West or the Western provinces of Canada, and commonly known within Canada as the West, is a Canadian region that includes the four western provinces just north of the Canada–United States border namely (from west to east) British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The people of the region are often referred to as "Western Canadians" or "Westerners", and though diverse from province to province are largely seen as being collectively distinct from other Canadians along cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, geographic, and political lines. They account for approximately 32% of Canada's total population. The region is further subdivided geographically and culturally between British Columbia, which is mostly on the western side of the Canadian Rockies and often referred to as the " west coast", and the "Prairie Provinces" (commonly known as "the Prairies"), which include those provinces on the easter ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Wayde Compton
Wayde Compton (born 1972) is a Canadian writer. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Compton has published books of poetry, essays, and fiction, and he edited the first comprehensive anthology of black writing from British Columbia. He co-founded Commodore Books with David Chariandy and Karina Vernon in 2006, the first black-oriented press in Western Canada. He also co-founded the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project in 2002, a grassroots organization that promotes the history of Vancouver's black community. Compton teaches in the faculty of Creative Writing at Douglas College. In 1996 he penned the semi-autobiographical poem "Declaration of the Halfrican Nation".Compton, Wayde''Performance Bond'' Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004, p. 15. Bibliography Anthologies *''Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature'' (2001) *''The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them'' (with Renee Sarojini Saklikar) (2015) Fiction *''The Outer Harbour: Stories'' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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David Chariandy
David Chariandy is a Canadian writer. His parents immigrated to Canada from Trinidad in the 1960s. He was born in Scarborough, Ontario. His father is from South Asian descent, whereas his mother is African. They were both working class immigrants. His surname represents his Tamil and South Indian origins from his father's side. Chariandy has a MA from Carleton and a PhD from York University. He lives in Vancouver and teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University. Chariandy's family includes his wife and two children: a son and a daughter. In his work he explores the truest meaning of origins and birthplace for immigrants and their children growing up in another part of the world but still belonging to another. Recurring themes and cultural contexts Chariandy's novels are set in Scarborough, an eastern region of Toronto, Ontario. This area is known for its immigrant heavy population and has been sometime stigmatized by a reputation for crime, although st ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vancouver
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The Greater Vancouver, Greater Vancouver area had a population of 2.6million in 2021, making it the List of census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada#List, third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. Greater Vancouver, along with the Fraser Valley Regional District, Fraser Valley, comprises the Lower Mainland with a regional population of over 3 million. Vancouver has the highest population density in Canada, with over 5,700 people per square kilometre, and fourth highest in North America (after New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City). Vancouver is one of the most Ethnic origins of people in Canada, ethnically and Languages of Canada, linguistically diverse cities in Canada: 49.3 percent of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fred Booker
Fred Booker (1939–2008) was a Canadian author and singer-songwriter. Booker immigrated to Canada in 1966 from the United States and became a notable member of Vancouver's music and literary scenes. His intimately personal songs were often characterized by his versatile acoustic guitar riffs and resonating vibrato voice. Amongst Booker's influences were Black American poetry and spoken word, gospel, folk and jazz music, some of which he accredited to his experience growing up in a Baptist church and hearing the blues and gospel songs that were often sung in his childhood home. His experience as a black man in Vancouver and the "Pacific Rain Forest of British Columbia" became the subject of much of his poetry and songwriting, where he reflected on things like his time travelling and touring Canada, his hardships amidst the starkly contrasting class structure of Vancouver, and his continuous admiration for the mystery of both his urban and rural surroundings. In 2006, the Vancou ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Addena Sumter-Freitag
Addena Sumter-Freitag is a Canadian author, poet, performer and speaker. She grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sumter-Freitag has performed her one-woman play ''Stay Black & Die'' across Canada and in Australia since 1995. It won Best Production at the Montreal Fringe Festival The St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival is a festival that hosts fringe theatre, repertory, dance, music, and drag-queen performances in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The festival is held annually and lasts for 20 days in June. The festival was prev ..., and was published by Commodore Books in 2007. In 2009, Wattle and Daub Books published her collection of poems, ''Back in the Days''. ''Canadian Literature'' called the latter a "memorably intimate journey, relating her experiences growing up as a black girl in Winnipeg's North End in the 1950s" and noted that "Sumter-Freitag's will undoubtedly become one of the most prominent poetic voices of Canada's Black community." Sumter-Freitag is a seventh generation Afr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Winnipeg
Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749,607 and a metropolitan population of 834,678, making it the sixth-largest city, and eighth-largest metropolitan area in Canada. The city is named after the nearby Lake Winnipeg; the name comes from the Western Cree words for "muddy water" - “winipīhk”. The region was a trading centre for Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans; it is the traditional territory of the Anishinabe (Ojibway), Ininew (Cree), Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota, and is the birthplace of the Métis Nation. French traders built the first fort on the site in 1738. A settlement was later founded by the Selkirk settlers of the Red River Colony in 1812, the nucleus of which was incorporated as the City of Winnipeg in 1873. Being far inland, the local cl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paddle Steamer
A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine that drives paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water. In antiquity, paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, where the first uses were wheelers driven by animals or humans. In the early 19th century, paddle wheels were the predominant way of propulsion for steam-powered boats. In the late 19th century, paddle propulsion was largely superseded by the screw propeller and other marine propulsion systems that have a higher efficiency, especially in rough or open water. Paddle wheels continue to be used by small, pedal-powered paddle boats and by some ships that operate tourist voyages. The latter are often powered by diesel engines. Paddle wheels The paddle wheel is a large steel framework wheel. The outer edge of the wheel is fitted with numerous, regularly spaced paddle blades (called floats or buckets). The bottom quarter or so of the wheel travels under water. An e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts and grassy plains, and borders the province of Alberta to the east and the Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north. With an estimated population of 5.3million as of 2022, it is Canada's third-most populous province. The capital of British Columbia is Victoria and its largest city is Vancouver. Vancouver is the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada; the 2021 census recorded 2.6million people in Metro Vancouver. The first known human inhabitants of the area settled in British Columbia at least 10,000 years ago. Such groups include the Coast Salish, Tsilhqotʼin, and Haida peoples, among many others. One of the earliest British settlements in the area was Fort Victoria, established ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. The city of Victoria is the 7th most densely populated city in Canada with . Victoria is the southernmost major city in Western Canada and is about southwest from British Columbia's largest city of Vancouver on the mainland. The city is about from Seattle by airplane, seaplane, ferry, or the Victoria Clipper passenger-only ferry, and from Port Angeles, Washington, by ferry across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Named for Queen Victoria, the city is one of the oldest in the Pacific Northwest, with British settlement beginning in 1843. The city has retained a large number of its historic buildings, in particular its two most famous landmarks, the Parliament Buildings (finished in 1897 and home of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |