Dr. Afua Cooper is a multidisciplinary scholar and artist… Her expertise includes African Canadian culture, gender, slavery, abolition, and freedom, Black orature, education, and Black agency and political consciousness. Her creative work has been recognized with national and international awards. In Feb. 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recognized Dr. Cooper as one of the women, through her work in Black Studies, who are changing Canadian society for the better. In April 2018, Afua was installed as Halifax’s 7th Poet Laureate.
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
