I moderated a discussion between two incredible Black women and poets, Britta Badour and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek at Kingston Writersfest. This episode is the live recording of our discussion on Saturday, September 30. Britta was promoting her latest book of poetry, Wires That Sputter and Otoniya was promoting her latest book, Song & Dread.
Bios for the authors:
Britta B: Born and raised in Kingston, Britta Badour, better known as Britta B., is an award-winning artist, spoken word poet, performer, emcee, voice talent and mentor living in Toronto. Britta has been a Toronto Arts Foundation's Emerging Artist and COCA Lecturer of the Year. Her work has been featured in print, in sound and onstage across North America in notable spheres such as the Art
Gallery of Ontario, CBC Arts: Poetic License, The Walrus Talks, TED and The Stephen Lewis Foundation. As an educator, Britta facilitates artist-training seminars, poetry workshops and social justice programs in partnership with
organizations like JAYU, Poetry in Voice, Prologue Performing Arts, and League of Canadian Poets. Britta holds a Creative Writing MFA from the University of Guelph and is a professor of spoken word performance at Seneca College
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her collection 100 Days, a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several prizes including the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Awards and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. "What makes this collection such a pleasure to read," says a Huffington Post review, "is that it's laced with moments of such grace that you have to pause and re-read the lines again in order to reflect upon each phrase...a masterpiece of uncommon splendour and
Juliane Okot Bitek is a virtuoso performing at the height of her powers." Otoniya's poem "Migration: Salt
Stories" was shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards for Poetry, and "Gauntlet" was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work has been published widely in publications such as Event, The Capilano Review, Room, and Arc, and anthologized in Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the
Ups, Downs, Ins & Outs of Marriage, and Transition: Writing Black Canadas, amongst others. Otoniya holds an MA in English, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC. She has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity, English, and Creative Writing at Queen's University.
