Writing out of the Abyss: Black Literature’s Creative Rebellions
October 1, 2025
Upcoming Event
Date: October 1, 2025
Time: 8:00 pm EST
Free, online / Registration required
The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant described the Middle Passage of New World enslavement as an “experience of the abyss.” How do Black writers, confronting such a legacy, forge narratives that cultivate resilience, generative creativity and complex identities?
American poet Roger Reeves and Bahamian poet Georgio Russell discuss the challenges, and triumphs, of the artistic refusals and reinventions that transform this traumatic history of suppression, marginalization and erasure into literature. Moderated by Esi Edugyan.
REGISTER HERE / GET LINKAbout the Panelists
Roger Reeves
Roger Reeves (he/him) is the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize. His book Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023) was a finalist for the 2024 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. His debut collection, King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), was a Library Journal Best Poetry pick and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Reeves is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas, Austin.
Georgio Russell
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and graduate of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is a fellow of the Obsidian Foundation, the Undocupoets, and is currently supported by the Toronto Arts Council. Russell has won The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024), the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry (2025), the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Year (2025), and the Rumpus Poetry Prize (2025), judged by Kaveh Akbar. He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and ARC’s Poem of The Year contest (2025).
Esi Edugyan (moderator)
Esi Edugyan is the author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, Half-Blood Blues, and Washington Black. Half-Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel, Washington Black, also won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
This event is part of a webinar series, Drawn to the Page, meant for young writers to develop their craft and purpose as an author.
Occurring bi weekly on Wednesdays in October, recent winners of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award will discuss what pulls them to the page, and consider, in dialogue with their mentors, collaborators or award-winning peers, how writers respond to the social and political challenges of their time.
The webinars are free to attend. Registration is required for each session.
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