Freeport, Bahamas - Bahamian poet, Christian Campbell will be
reading from his first collection of poetry, Running
the Dusk, on Saturday the
16th April, 2011 at 6:00p.m. at the Rand Nature Centre, Settler’s
Way, Freeport, Grand Bahama. Admission is free. All are
welcome to attend.
Born in Freeport, Grand Bahama,
Christian Campbell is a writer of Bahamian and Trinidadian heritage.
He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a PhD at Duke
University. His poetry and essays have been published widely in
journals and anthologies such as
Callaloo,
Indiana Review, New Caribbean Poetry, New Poetries IV, PN Review, Poetry
London, Small Axe, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, The Routledge
Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Wasafiri
and
West Branch
.
His work has been translated into Spanish in the anthology
Poetas del Caribe Ingles
. An Assistant Professor of English
at the University of Toronto, he has received grants and fellowships
from Cave Canem, the Arvon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Lannan
Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center and the University of Birmingham.
He is the author of
Running
the Dusk,
which was a finalist
for the Cave Canem Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First
Book in the UK and is the winner of the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection
Prize. He is the second Caribbean poet to be shortlisted for the
Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First Book and the first poet of colour
to win the Aldeburgh Prize.
In
Running
the Dusk,
Christian Campbell
takes us to dusk, what the French call
l’heure
entre chien et loup
, the
hour between dog and wolf, to explore ambiguity and intersection, danger
and desire, loss and possibility. These poems of wild imagination
shift shape and shift generation, remapping Caribbean, British and African
American geographies: Oxford becomes Oxfraud; Shabba Ranks duets with
Césaire; Sidney Poitier is reconsidered in an exam question; market
women hawk poetry beside knock-off Gucci bags; elegies for ancestors
are also for land and sea. Here is dancing at the crossroads between
reverence and irreverence. Dusk is memory, dusk is dream,
dusk is a way to re-imagine the past.
