Atwater Library and Computer Centre

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1960, a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi’kmaq Amerindian heritage. He has published in a variety of genres: verse collections including Blue and Execution Poems, the verse-novel,  Whylah Falls, two verse plays, Whylah Falls: The Play, and Beatrice Chancy, the opera libretto Québécité, and the novel George & Rue, as well as criticism and non-fiction. He has won the Governor General's Award and a National Magazine Award, been longlisted for the IMPAC Award and has recently been made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

His latest book, I &I, has been called “a profusion of rhetorical tropes and schemes and a breathtaking array of literary and cultural allusion.” In I & I, a verse novel set in the Boogie Nights era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax to sunburnt Corpus Christi and back, meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with forbidden lust and blazes with brutality. With his trademark artistry, Clarke fearlessly ignites the grotesque, and coaxes out glimpses of Eden.

To listen to Katia open the evening and introduce George Elliott Clarke, click here
To listen to George Elliott Clarke part 1, click here
To listen to George Elliott Clarke part 2, click here
To listen to George Elliott Clarke part 3, click here
To listen to Lateef Martin, click here