Join us for the dynamic first event in our Literartistry series. Christian Campbell will be reading for us on Thursday 3 October at 4:30pm in STJ 3027. Brianna Mantynen will be the opening act.
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| Photo credit: Toni McCrae |
Christian Campbell is a Trini-Bahamian
poet, scholar and cultural critic. He
has lived in the Caribbean, the US, the UK and Canada and this movement also
deeply informs his work. His first book, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (UK), a Lannan
Fellowship (US) and was a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize (US), the Forward
Prize for the Best First Book (UK) and the inaugural Guyana Prize for
Literature (Caribbean). He is the second Caribbean poet to be shortlisted for
the Forward Prize and the first poet of colour to win the Aldeburgh Prize, the
oldest prize for a first book of poetry in the UK. Running the Dusk was also named one of
the best books of 2010 by the Caribbean
Review of Books, Horizon Review
and Poetry International. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa
calls Running the Dusk “the
gutsy work of a long-distance runner who possesses the wit and endurance, the
staying power of authentic genius.”
Campbell’s poetry and essays have been published
widely in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo,
The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone
Caribbean Literature and elsewhere.
His work has been translated into Spanish in
the anthology Poetas del Caribe Ingles. He has received awards and fellowships from Cave
Canem, the Arvon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the
Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Birmingham and the Bread Loaf Writers
Conference. In 2012, he delivered the
fifteenth annual Derek Walcott Lecture for Nobel Laureate Week in St. Lucia
(the youngest chosen; former lecturers include Wole Soyinka and Rex
Nettleford), was a keynote speaker and poet at “The Power of
Caribbean Poetry—Word and Sound” Conference at the University of Cambridge and also was an invited poet at Poetry Parnassus, the
international poetry festival at the Cultural Olympiad of the recent Olympic
Games. Campbell, who studied at Oxford
as a Rhodes Scholar and received a PhD at Duke, is currently Assistant
Professor of English at the University of Toronto where he is working on a book
on black diaspora poetics.
