We've spent Black History Month highlighting the work of Black Authors and Illustrators that we love (check out our 28 Instagram posts). Here's to starting more conversations and reading the work of black authors all year round. 

Check out some highlights from our staff picks: 

Kathleen Collins was a civil rights activist, artist, and intellectual active in New York until her death in 1988. Her stories, plays, and cinematic treatments draw on her political history and intimate experiences to reveal a very complex and fascinating figure. Following the revelatory success of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, published in 2016, a new collection of stories, letters, diary entries, and scripts, Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary, has come out this month. We are truly lucky to at long last have access to an array of her spirited, fearless, and singular body of work.

- Chantale P.

Kiese Laymon is a writer, editor, and professor, and recently published a new memoir, Heavy. ''Wow, just wow'' is Roxane Gay's reaction, so I was sold before even opening up the book. Kiese Laymon talks about weight, race, gender, and being black in the South in this timely memoir. In the chapter Green, Laymon's grandmother is in the hospital with an infection in her scalp, the doctor ignores her cries of pain as he operates. ''Folk always assumed black women would recover but never cared if black women recovered.'' he says. Laymon looks outside of his own experiences with tenderness and care. He contemplates men and masculinity.. He does not shy away from the ways he is also complicit in the mistreatment of women, and he highlights how much women have taught and fed him. If you haven’t read Laymon’s work, you need to get on it, because he is definitely a voice to be listening to right now!

- Eli Tareq

Dany Laferrière est né en 1953 à Port-au-Prince et passe son enfance à Petit-Goâve. Il devient journaliste, mais se voit forcé de quitter Haïti en 1976 à cause de la dictature. Au Québec, où il choisit de s’installer, son premier roman, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) rencontre un grand succès. On compare son écriture à celle d’Henry Miller et de Bukowski. Il est considéré comme l’un des plus importants auteurs de sa génération, développant une oeuvre autobiographique, philosophique, sensuelle et nostalgique. L’énigme du retour, paru en 2009 reçoit le Prix Médicis, Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal et le Prix des Libraires du Québec 2010. En 2013, il devient le premier auteur du Canada et d’Haïti élu à l’Académie Française. Son dernier ouvrage, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat mélangeant texte et dessin est paru aux Éditions Boréal en 2018.

- Flore 

Yvan Alagbé est à l’honneur! Son dernier recueil regroupe des histoires écrites entre 1994 et 2011, des histoires brutes relatant les tensions entre la France et l’Afrique, immigrés, exilés, travailleurs fantômes, les forces policières… Son utilisation du noir et du blanc, jouant avec les contrastes, les ombres et les traits nets et expressifs, rendent la lecture urgente, puissante. Les critiques ont qualifié ce livre «d’une des bandes dessinées les plus importantes de ces vingt dernières années». 

 - Catherine 

Ezra Clayton Daniels is a writer, illustrator, and artist based in Los Angeles. His incredible graphic novel Upgrade Soul (winner of the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity) is a speculative story of regeneration and the strange possibilities of cloning. His stories are filled with generosity for his characters and a spirit of curiosity. We can’t wait for his upcoming collaboration with another Librairie fav Ben Passmore, BTTM FDRS (June 2019), a near-future look at what can horrifically grow from gentrification.

- Chantale P. 

David Chariandy is a masterful prose stylist, and his oeuvres includes his much lauded debut Soucouyant (2007), Brother (2017), his most recent work: the powerful epistolary essay I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (2018). The scope of Chariandy’s writing, right down to the sentence structure and verb choices convey mastery of the form, whose work is full of surprises. Such a poignant, melodious writer, it is no surprise that Chariandy is recognized by a plethora of awards including the 2018 Toronto Book Award, Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, Canada Reads, Giller and Governor General’s Nominations. 

- Luke 

Every day for Black History Month, Librairie D+Q is celebrating Black Authors & Artists we love! Today, Eli Tareq is excited to highlight the work of Darnell Moore. Moore is a queer activist and writer, whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial frameworks. Charming and eloquent, I first discovered his work through interviews on different podcasts and fell quickly into his words when reading No Ashes in the Fire. Writing about queer love between black men, Moore explores sexuality, blackness, violence, love, resilience, coming of age, and much more in his exciting debut memoir. Merging his personal experience with the social-political going-ons of the times, Moore’s writing always moves between the personal to the political, and reinforces the idea that the personal is political. Moore says about trying to be ‘‘normal’’ as a kid that “[...] “normal” is a pass afforded only to those who are too scared to dream, too afraid to transgress. Queerness is a way of life people fear because in it they might find freedom. But I was caged for a long time before I took hold of my liberation.’’ He ultimately succeeds in writing a love song to queer and trans people, particularly black queer and trans folks. 

 - Eli Tareq

Renee Gladman is a poet, artist, “writer of drawings”. Gladman is the author of the wonderful Ravicka novel cycle—concerning an imagined city and its peculiar inhabitants, but just as urgently thinking about “the sentence as a city”—a remarkable collection of essays entitled Calamities, and a monograph of drawings (one of my all-time favourites), among others. Any attempt at biography pales in comparison to the writer’s own assessment: “I’m a prose writer excited by how language passes through places: the mind, out the body, across the page, through thought or description.”.

- Benjamin

Whit Taylor is a prolific comics artist. Taylor’s first full-length book, Ghost Stories, features three short stories about trauma, loss, and growing up. The storytelling in this book is vivid, just like Taylor’s colour pallette.

Oyinkan Braithwaite. Braithwaite is a freelance editor and writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut novel, My Sister the Serial Killer, has become a massive bestseller, and chronicles the story of a Nigerian woman whose sister has the inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends!

As today marks the end of February, we end these posts with a quote from Marlon James from his interview on CBC this month. A big fan of My Sister the Serial Killer, James widens the scope and urges us to read stories from around the world, to decenter white and western narratives:

“What about African novels that are being published in Kinshasa right now? (...) What about novels that are not written in English? The century is still pretty young, and we have chance to really blow wide open the idea of books and the idea of literature and what stories we can read and what stories we allow ourselves to fall in love with and I think everybody including prizes can play a bigger role in bringing books to the world. I want to know what’s the hot street novel in Nigeria right now? I wanna know what is going on in Lagos. And I want to (...) have everyone reading a book like My Sister the Serial Killer that just came out, a wonderful book. I want ten more of those, and I bet they’re there!”

Let’s read Black Authors all year. Let’s discover the work of new and underrepresented authors of colour and make sure to listen, to read, and to learn from folks who have different lived experiences than our own!

And if you'd like to discover more Black comic artists, check out the anthology Black Comix Returns. If you want to read more about Black writers in Canada, check out the new book Black Writers Matter, ed. by Whitney French, in store now!  

David Chariandy says "Black Writers Matter is an extraordinary achievement, a bold and loving gathering of Black writing in its sublimity; its stylistic and thematic complexity; its regional, cultural, generational, and experiential differences; its fiercely constellated energy. Whitney French and the talented contributors to this book offer us vital new writings within a two-hundred-year legacy of yearning and truth-telling. Please read this book."