Dr. Afua Cooper is a celebrated poet, spoken word icon, author, scholar, and historian. Her many books range across such genres as poetry, history, fiction, and children’s literature. She served as the Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality for the 2018-2020 term. She is a founder of the Canadian Dub Poetry Movement, and a recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Portia White Prize (Nova Scotia’s most distinguished artistic award), the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry prize, the Bob Marley Award, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Prize. Her poems have been included in numerous literary anthologies and on studio recordings. Read more…

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Cooper is to be congratulated for long, careful and thoroughly engaged research and passionate, engaging writing…

Incantatory, vivid, passionate, sensual, incendiary — Afua Cooper’s poetry delivers rich nourishment for the imagination. Copper Woman brings mythic, historical, and present-day voices and characters to provocative, multi-dimensional life, all the way from Africa to the Caribbean to Canada and beyond. Those of us who have been wowed by Cooper’s live performances of her work will be equally taken with the ways the poems rise and breathe from the pages of this charged, bristling collection.
—Allan Briesmaster, poet, and author of Weighted Light and Unleaving

The most important piece of Canadian history written in decades, Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique shakes the earth beneath the Canadian nation story. Thorough, original, and masterful, this book is a stunning reclamation of one woman’s life, but it is also a reclamation of Africans in early North American history. Trenchant and engagingly written, this book is brilliant.”
— Dionne Brand, Award-winning poet and novelist. Author of What We All Long For and A Map to the Door of No Return