While Black Community Bookshelf Project

While Black: a forum for speculation on what the gallery can’t hold is a multi-year series of forums, talks, and public presentations developed and organized by Black curators from across Canada in conversation with artists to consider both the limits and possibilities of the relationship between contemporary art spaces in Canada and Black art, artists, arts workers, and audiences.

In September and October 2023, GVPL's sxʷeŋxʷəŋ təŋəxʷ James Bay Branch, home to the Mifflin Wistar Gibbs Study Room, hosted a display of these books as part of the While Black Blackspace Project of bookshelves located in select locations around Greater Victoria.

Updated September 8, 2023
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Greater Victoria Public Library
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Aya love in Yop City
Abouet, Marguerite, 1971- 
Paper Book
"Oubrerie's style animates both the broadly funny and painfully grave moments in Abouet's rhythmic slice-of-life storytelling." --The Washington Post Aya: Love in Yop City comprises the final three chapters of the Aya story, episodes never before seen in...
Cranial Guitar.
Kaufman, Bob; Nicosia, Gerald; Henderson, David. 
Paper Book
Winner, PEN Center USA West 1997 Literary Award. Finalist, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. "Straight from some astral plane comes the ghost of this great Beat poet. . . . This is not so much a collection as it is a steam-pipe explosion.--Publishers Weekly Includes a...
Fledgling
Butler, Octavia E.
Paper Book
A newly expanded edition of Octavia E. Butler's only collection of short stories. Butler graces new mansions of thought with her eloquent, distinguished and poignant prose. Although this book is little in size, its ideas are splendidly large.' - Booklist 'The title story is justly famous. Splendid...
In the Black fantastic
Eshun, Ekow 
Paper Book
A richly illustrated exploration of Black culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious, and politically urgent. A richly illustrated exploration of Black culture at its most wildly imaginative and artistically ambitious, In the Black Fantastic assembles...
Invisible man
Ellison, Ralph. 
Paper Book
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time * Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its...
Kindred
Butler, Octavia E. 
Paper Book
No further information has been provided for this title.
Sister outsider
Lorde, Audre
Paper Book
"Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by the pioneering feminist Audre Lorde, is one of my all-time-favorite books. It's always great to have an intersectional tome on hand." --Amanda Gorman   "Sister Outsider's teachings, by one of our...
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness.
Kaufman, Bob. 
Paper Book
Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."

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