Bertrand Bickersteth

Poet, Playwright, Essayist, Font Designer

Highway road on the prairies, summer evening, dusky light. The road has agricultural crops

Coming Fall 2026

Numinous Animal

Numinous Animal explores the forgotten history of Black cowboys on the Prairies. Part memoir, part regional history, and part literary analysis, it follows a journey of discovery through 19th- and early 20th-century cattle brands. This ambitious text traces lines that connect West Africa to Nova Scotia, Cowtown to Freetown, the Underground Railroad to Cowboy trails. Along the way, he collides the archives of Black cattle brands with Afrofuturism of technology in surprising ways.

Bickersteth’s artistry deconstructs marks of livelihood, ownership, and dehumanization, and reconstructs them into a language of life, freedom, and love.

Published by Athabasca University Press, September 26, 2026.

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Award Winner

The Response of Weeds

The Response of Weeds explores what it means to be Black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. This collection of evocative poems was the winner of multiple awards.

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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.

Black Cowboy Font: this is not an event, but it's totally an event! I designed this font based on the cattle brands of Black cowboys and ranchers, 1889-1920. How's that for recuperating history? You can even try it out yourself!

November 26, 2025, Writers' Guild of Alberta, Controversy at Noon Panel, "The Things They Never Told Me About Publication," 12:00 PM (MST)

March 2, Mount Royal University, Department of Education,"Blackness, Education, and the Poetics of Blithe Belonging," 10:45-12:00 p.m. (MST)

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Appearances

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.