Coming Spring 2027
Canadian Colored
Canadian Colored is the long-anticipated sophomore collection of poetry from Bertrand Bickersteth. These poems focus on the history of migration of Black communities into the Prairies at the start of the 20th century.
The collection features the much-anthologized "We, Too," as well as "Wakanda, Oklahoma," which was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize, and "Rotary," an invented poetic form based on crop rotations.
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To be published by NeWest Press in 2027.
This unofficial image is an imagined placeholder and not a faithful rendering of the book's eventual cover.
In these poems, Bickersteth invites the reader to revisit the prairies as landscape, but also as part of Black history, geography, and psychic and poetic space... this is an essential book by an enormously talented writer.
Suzette Mayr - author of The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the Giller Prize
Praise & Reviews
In Bickersteth's interpretation we hear a blue modality and we feel Alberta sung as a point of arrival and departure, a junction in the diaspora. This collection questions place and beloonging as it amplifies the Black Prairie.
Kaie Kellough - author of Magnetic Equator, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize
Bertrand Bickersteth is our wayfarer. ... HIs verse, finely hewn, glitters with light that both dazzles and burns. He's the CanLit I never got to experience in all my time in school and university.
Minister Faust - award-winning author of Shrinking the Heroes
Upcoming Events
Don't miss the chance to engage with Bertrand Bickersteth at these upcoming events and literary gatherings.
About the Author
Bertrand Bickersteth was born in Sierra Leone and raised in Alberta. His collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was the recipient of multiple awards. His writing has appeared in many places including Geist, Prairie Fire, The Walrus, The Sprawl, and CBC’s Black on the Prairies. His current project features the history of Black cowboys in western Canada. He lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) and teaches at Olds College.