Writer-in-Residence, 2013-14
M. NourbeSe Philip
The Department of English and Writing Studies is proud to announce the 2013-14 Writer-in-Residence, M. NourbeSe Philip. This residency will be co-sponsored with the Faculty of Law, the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, and Western’s Women’s Caucus.
Biography: Guggenheim fellow, winner of a Toronto Arts Award, poet, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist and lawyer, M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and moved to Canada to attend Western University, where she graduated with a law degree in 1973. After seven years in practice, first at Parkdale Community Services and then in the partnership Jemmott and Philip, Philip left law in 1983 to devote her time to writing.
Philip’s most recent book, Zong! (2008) is a book-length poem based on an eighteenth-century court case, Gregson vs. Gilbert, the only public document related to the lives and deaths of 150 Africans murdered for insurance money aboard the slave ship Zong. Fugal, fragmented, and deeply moving, Zong! has been adapted through multimedia performance, including a dramatized reading at Toronto Harbourfront as part of "rock.paper.sistahz" in April 2006. In 2012, Philip held a seven-hour interactive reading of the complete poem at b current studio space in Toronto while simultaneously, in Blomfontaine, South Africa, another audience held a collective reading.
Philip’s other major works include the young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988), her second novel Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) and the groundbreaking and award-winning poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize in poetry. Author of four collections of essays, three additional collections of poetry, and two plays, Philip’s work spans and interweaves genres, attending to language in particular—her work is often noted for its deconstruction of grammar, while her newest poem engages legal language. Philip takes up themes of colonialism, race, memory, identity, and place, modeling the intersections of politics and poetics with her innovations on form. In her non-fiction work, Philip is a committed social critic, bringing her years of study in economics, political science and law to bear on Canadian social policy. Her poetry is included in the new collection, The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013)
Former Writer-in-Residence at University of the West Indies, McMaster University, University of Windsor, Urban Ink, b current, and the Toronto Women’s Book Store, M. NourbeSe Philip will join us at Western University as the 2013-14 Writer-in-Residence in the Fall term. (Biography by Nina Budabin McQuown)
See the Western News article on the Writer-in-Residence and Student Writer-in-Residence:
http://communications.uwo.ca/western_news/stories/2013/February/writers_in_residence_to_give_creative_writing_voice.html