M. NourbeSe Philip
NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and former lawyer. She is a Fellow of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller (Bellagio) Foundations and the MacDowell Colony. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Casa de las Americas prize (Cuba). Among her best-known works are: She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks; Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence; and Zong!, a genre-breaking poem that engages with ideas of the law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Philip lives in Toronto.
Blank: Interviews and Essays
Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers and thinkers. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Blank explores questions of race, the body politic, timeliness, recurrence, on-goingness, art and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.