Sankofa’s Pen 9th anniversary 

Community has always been an important value to me in every job/work that I do. It's something I take with me in my writing work too.

Today was really special.

I organized a Black Kidlit Creators Brunch at Boukan restaurant in Toronto with members of Sankofa's Pen (formerly known as the AfricanCanadianWriters and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults/ACWCYA), a group I started nine years ago.  Now we're an online Facebook group.  This was the first time we gathered in person in several years.

In attendance were: Joseph Osei Bonsu, Kern Carter, Ndija Anderson-Yantha, Sade Smith Author, Chesand Manana Gloria, Kimberly Dawkins, Alexandra C. Yeboah, and Nadia L. Hohn.

We shared our books, challenges, triumphs, and goals.

We look forward to doing this again in the spring 2023.

Check out our books and support our work.

Thanks Amanda Hamer and her team for the wonderful food and hospitality. ​

Articles and Podcasts 
“Ainara’s Bookshelf is Diversifying What We Read One Book at a Time”, ByBlacks February 2023

“Meet Dr. Suzette Mayr: The 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner”, ByBlacks January 2023

“Celebrate Black Canadian Authors This Holiday Season with These 36 Books”, ByBlacks  December 2022

“If You Love Black Panther, Then You’ll Love These Books”, ByBlacks         November 2022

“The Hairy Truth” and “A Deeper Meaning”, Owl Magazine,                              November 2022

“Three Black Organizations Working to Get Us Reading,” byblacks,         October 2022

“Top 10 Summer Reads for Black Canadian Kids,” byblacks,
August 2022

Travelling Across Canada’s Underground Railroad, Owl magazine (January/February 2022)

“Kojo’s Holiday”, Chickadee magazine (December 2021).

“How Harriet’s Daughter Helped Me Find My Way as a Black Canadian and a Writer for Young People”, Arc Poetry magazine (Arc 96 Islands of Influence Caribbean Canadian edition) (Fall 2021).

“Writer with a Capital W”, University of Waterloo podcast

“Writer Finds Resilience Stories Black Women and Girls”, University of Waterloo magazine (Spring 2021). 


Upcoming books
Patty Dreams (Owlkids), Spring 2025.

Journey to Grandma's House (Groundwood Books), Fall 2024.

The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes) (Orca Books), Fall 2023.

Malaika, Carnival Queen (Groundwood Books), Spring 2023.


Published books
Kwanzaa section in Celebrate with me! Recipes, Crafts, and Holiday Fun from around the world (Magic Cat Publishing/Abrams Kids), 2022

Contributor to 100+ Voices for Miss Lou: Poetry, Tributes, Interviews, Essays anthology (UWI Press), 2021.

Louise Go A Country in 100+ Voices of Miss Lou: Poetry, Tributes, Interviews, Essays (UWI Press, 2022).

Interview in Contemporary Canadian Picture Books: A Critical Review for Educators, Librarians, Families, Researchers, & Writers by Beverley Brenna, Richard Dionne, and Theresa Tavares (Brill, 2021).

Malaika's Surprise (Groundwood Books), Spring 2021  https://houseofanansi.com/products/malaikas-surprise  French version available in 2022 by Éditions Scholastic, Malaika's Surprise Book Trailer

A Likkle Miss Lou: How Jamaican Poet Louise Bennett-Coverley Found Her Voice (Owlkids), Aug. 15, 2019 

Harriet Tubman: Freedom Fighter (Harper Collins), 2018 

Malaika's Winter Carnival (Groundwood Books), 2017 (available in French and English paperback http://scholastic.ca/editions/livres/view/le-carnaval-de-malaika)

Malaika's Costume (Groundwood Books www.groundwoodbooks.com), 2016 (available in French paperback www.scholastic.ca) 2021 TD Book Giveaway

Music in the Sankofa series (Rubicon Publishing), 2015 www.sankofacollection.com

Media in the Sankofa series (Rubicon Publishing), 2015 www.sankofacollection.com





© Nadia L. Hohn, 2023
Toronto, ON, Canada

​

In January 2023, I had the opportunity to interview 2022 Giller-prize winner Dr. Suzette Mayr.  The resulting article "Meet Dr. Suzette Mayr: The 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner", was published for the ByBlacks site at this link.

Due to space considerations for the article, I could not include all of the questions that I asked Suzette Mayr.  Please find below Dr. Mayr's response to the question about inspiration, as well as her thoughts 

What inspired you to write the Sleeping Car Porter?

My decision to write the novel was the result of a kind of challenge posed by one of my former writing teachers, the poet Fred Wah. One day more than 20 years ago he said to me out of the blue, “Suzette, you have to write about the porters!” I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t know what history he was referring to. Then he told me about how when he was a kid he was traveling on a train on the way to a Scout Jubilee or something like that, and a porter on the train brought out his trombone (Fred plays the trumpet), jammed with the kids, and it was a fond memory for Fred. I started doing some research into sleeping-car porters in Canada and I learned that they were almost all black men; that portering was perhaps the best-paid job a black man in Canada could get, but they regularly faced terrible prejudice; that porters had a key role in labour and civil rights in Canada; and that some porters were either the fathers of famous Canadians like pianist Oscar Peterson, or they went on to become famous people in their own right, like Rufus Rockhead of Rockhead’s Paradise and Stanley G. Grizzle.

Writing the book was also about trying to find a history that’s unrecoverable or that has been lost or deliberately hidden, but that I desperately wanted or maybe even needed. Saidiya Hartman writes about “critical fabulation” which I understand as a writing/research process a writer can use when there’s only so much historical or archival information available about a particular subject: when the available archival information falters, as an academic or a writer you can take that patchy archival information and try to fill in the gaps with fictional renderings of what might have happened. I’m writing about a gay, black man in the 1920s who works on a train during a time when queerness in Canada was punishable by prison or worse, and during a time of really intense anti-black racism. There are no records beyond sketchy criminal court records of how someone like my main character might have lived or felt, but in order to understand myself as a black, queer person, I needed to “find” those records to understand my place and who I am. My need to find an ancestor – to find black, queer family – kept me going through the process of writing this book.


Why was it important for Baxter to want to become a dentist?  

I needed to give Baxter a passion that could keep him going as a porter, and give him a goal to work towards so that he could endure the drudgery and humiliation of being a sleeping car porter in 1929. 

Looking into people’s mouths can tell you so much about them: whether they eat well, their stress levels, their childhood, and their hobbies. Baxter has to know the passengers better than they know themselves to anticipate their needs and get good tips. Teeth and mouths represent yet another way he can get inside them and understand them.


I had to check if The Scarab of Jupiter book was real and it isn’t. But it felt real, reminiscent of the time when zombie, low budget horror movies dominated that period.  Why was the Scarab of Jupiter important?

It was super important because for Baxter as a character The Scarab from Jupiter was the only way he could get out of his immediate situation without physically leaving. The book for Baxter is a solace and sanctuary; it’s representative of the fact that there’s more to life than being a sleeping car porter, and that the powerful people who rule over him don’t always win. The customer isn’t always right; sometimes the customer has their brain eaten by alien insects.


At one point, the conductor or Baxter’s boss said, “Click click click, boy.”  What was happening there?

For me, that moment is when Baxter has reached a level of such profound frustration with and hatred of the job and the passengers he has to deal with that he disassociates and becomes a robot like the robots he reads about in his science fiction magazines – because only a robot could put up with the racism and rottenness of the job. At that moment, he’s snapped, but even so his body knows that he can’t let the passengers or the conductor see that he’s snapped, so he deduces himself to be an inanimate object.
​