Biography

Of African-American and Mi'kmaq heritage, poet, dramatist, anthologist, academic, and novelist, George Elliott Clarke has roots in Nova Scotia going back to the early nineteenth century on his mother’s side and to the late nineteenth century on his father’s side. Clarke was born in Windsor Plains, Nova Scotia in 1960, but grew up in Halifax. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Waterloo, did a Master's degree at Dalhousie University, and completed his Ph.D. at Queen’s University. He taught at Duke University in North Carolina from 1993 to 1999 before moving to the University of Toronto, where he is the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature. In his literary and academic writing, Clarke has been a vocal proponent of the history and culture of African-Canadians in the Maritimes. His promotion of the African-Canadian community in the Maritimes is evident in his editing of the two-volume Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing (1991) and in many of the essays collected in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002), and it infuses his poetry and fiction as well. Clarke has published five volumes of poetry, including his debut collection, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983), and the highly acclaimed Whylah Falls (1990), a lyrical portrait of a fictional Black community in Nova Scotia during the Depression, which won the Archibald Lampman Award for poetry. His play Beatrice Chancy (1999) is a reworking of the story of Beatrice Cenci in Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century, when slavery was practiced in the region. In 2001, Clarke won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry for Execution Poems, a collection based on the hangings of two of his cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, for the brutal killing of a white Fredericton taxi driver in January of 1949. The murder was also the subject of Clarke's first novel, George & Rue, published in 2005. In 2006, Clarke was awarded the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Fellowship Prize, and in 2008 was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for "his contributions as a poet, professor and volunteer who has brought his original voice and his perspective on the Black experience to contemporary Canadian literature," amongst other achievements.

Bibliography

  • Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. Porter's Lake: Pottersfield Press, 1983.
  • Whylah Falls. Vancouver: Polestar Press, 1990. ed. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. Lawrencetown Beach: Pottersfield Press, 1991.
  • Provencal Songs. Ottawa: Magnum Book Store, 1993.
  • Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993. Lawrencetown Beach: Pottersfield Press, 1994.
  • Provencal Songs II. Ottawa: Above/ground Press, 1997. ed. Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997.
  • Whylah Falls: The Play. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1999.
  • Beatrice Chancy. Victoria: Polestar Books, 1999.
  • Gold Indigoes. Durham: Carolina: Wren Press, 2000.
  • Execution Poems. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2001.
  • Blue. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2001.
  • Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
  • Quebecite. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2003.
  • Illuminated Verses. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2005.
  • George & Rue. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005.
  • Black. Vancouver: Polestar, 2006.
  • Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path. Kentville: Gaspereau, 2007.
  • Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke. Ed. Jon Paul Florentino. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008.
  • I & I. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2009.
  • Red. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2011.
  • Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Selected Overviews
Execution
George
Saltwater
Whylah

Click on selected overview to read...

Critical Sources

  • Andrews, Jennifer. "Re-Visioning Fredericton: Reading George Elliott Clarke's Execution Poems." Studies in Canadian Literature 33.2 (2008): 115-32.
  • Banks, Michelle. "Myth-Making and Exile: The Desire for a Homeplace in George Elliott Clarke's Whylah Falls." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 51 (2002): 58-85.
  • Brydon, Diana. "George Elliott Clarke's Othello." Canadian Literature 182 (2004): 188-94.
  • Clarke, George Elliott. "Embracing Beatrice Chancy, Or in Defence of Poetry." New Quarterly: New Directions in Canadian Writing 20.3 (2000): 15-24.
  • Compton, Anne. "Standing Your Ground: George Elliott Clarke in Conversation." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 23.2 (1998): 138-64.
  • Compton, Wayde. "'Even the Stars are Temporal': The Historical Motion of George Elliott Clarke's Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues." West Coast Line 22.1 (1997): 156-63.
  • Compton, Wayde, and Kevin McNeilly. "The Crime of Poetry: George Elliott Clarke in Conversation with Wayde Compton and Kevin McNeilly." Canadian Literature 182 (2004): 53-64.
  • Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. "On Black Canadian Writing: In Conversation with George Elliott Clarke." Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 23.2 (2001): 187-200.
  • Greenblatt, Jordana. "Something Sadistic, Something Complicit: Text and Violence in Thirsty and Execution Poems." Canadian Literature 197 (2008): 80-95.
  • Hlongwane, Gugu D. "Whips, Hammers and Ropes: The Burden of Race and Desire in Clarke's George & Rue." Studies in Canadian Literature 33.1 (2008): 291-306.
  • Knutson, Susan. “’I am become Aaron’: George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Canadian Cultural Exchange: Translation and Transculturation. Ed. Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. 29-56.
  • Kyser, Kristina. “George and Ruth: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke about Writing and Ethics.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007): 861-73.
  • Lane, M. Travis. "An Impoverished Style: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 16 (1985): 47-54.
  • Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-18.
  • MacLeod, Alexander. "'The Little State of Africadia Is a Community of Believers':  Replacing the Regional and Remaking the Real in the Work of George Elliott Clarke." Studies in Canadian Literature 33.2 (2008): 96-114.
  • McLeod, Katherine. "'Oui, Let's Scat': Listening to Multivocality in George Elliott Clarke's Jazz Opera." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42.1 (2009): 133-50.
  • Moynagh, Maureen. "Mapping Africadia's Imaginary Geography: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 27.4 (1996): 71-94.
  • "Signature Pieces: Revisiting 'Race' and Authorship." Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 152-71.
  • Steven, Lawrence. “Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate?” Canadian Cultural Exchange: Translation and Transculturation. Ed. Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. 99-119.
  • Thomas, H. Nigel. "Some Aspects of Blues use in George Elliott Clarke's Whylah Falls." CLA Journal 43.1 (1999): 1-18.
  • Wells, Dorothy. "A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke's 'Africadia'." Canadian Literature 155 (1997): 56-73. Willis, Susan. "Anansi History: George Elliott Clarke's Whylah Falls." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 9.1 (2002): 47-56.
  • Wilson, Ann. "Beatrice Chancy: Slavery, Martyrdom and the Female Body." Siting the Other: Re-Visions of Marginality in Australian and English- Canadian Drama. Ed. Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi. Brussels, Belgium: Peter Lang, xi, 2001. 267-278.
  • Wyile, Herb. “‘We Have to Recover Their Bodies’: George Elliott Clarke.” Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University, 2007. 133-64.
  • . “Making a Mess of Things: Postcolonialism, Canadian Literature, and the Ethical Turn.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007): 821-37.

    More Sources
  • Canadian Writers - George Elliott Clarke

Videos

The Concept of Africadia (22mb)
Reading: "Antiphone" (3mb)
On the Literary Canon (17.5mb)
On George and Rufus Hamilton (30.5mb)
On Identity and Place (10.3mb)
"Selected Proverbs" from Whylah Falls (5mb)
"George & Rue: Pure Virtuous Killers" from Execution Poems (3.5mb)