Dr. Afua Cooper is a multidisciplinary scholar and artist. Her contribution to society includes the literary arts, history, humanities, education, and human and civil rights. Her twelve books range across such genres as history, poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. Dr. Cooper served as the Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality for the term 2018-2020.
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 UnleavingThe 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
