Olajide Salawu

Project:

Black Shivers: A Seasonal Anthology of Black Canadian Poets and Beyond

Description:

Black Shivers is a poetic reimagining of Black Canadian lifeworld through the harsh realities of winter. It asks poets to centralize seasonal experience in relation to diasporic struggles. While Black Canadian anthologies provide pedagogical and reclamatory orientation to understand Black literary histories and literary trajectories of writers, they also exist as organizing logic against other hegemonic structures, such as sexual or identitarian discrimination. This robust archive has yet to address the Arctic imaginary and has remained silent on the peculiar racialized climate of winter. Black Shivers explores the cold climate of Black Canadian diasporic lifeworlds, Black histories, post-migration struggles, resilience, and perceptions of northern realities such as seasonal cycles, tundra, the Rockies, Arctic atmosphere, blizzards, snowbirds, auroras, and the magical experiences of the solstice. It draws attention to the elegy of the snow, the pain of frostbite, and the suffering of newcomers settling into the frigidity. It asks: where are the enduring tropic images of root home and the voltage of diasporic cold? Summer/winter nostalgia? What kind of shivers does the Canadian cold produce for Black subjects: political, economic, social? Black Canadian poets and beyond are invited to explore themes and forms, and to tell winter-counter stories.

About Olajide:

Jide Salawu is a Nigerian-born poet and scholar with multiple awards, prizes, and fellowships, including the Fulbright Scholarship and the Andrew Stewart Memorial Prize to his credit. Salawu’s works explore migration, the new black diaspora, postcoloniality, seasonality, and African and black ruralities, with

publications in or forthcoming in leading African literary and cultural studies journals such as Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities, Journal of Modern Literature, and others. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland (2019), and Contraband Bodies (2025), and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes(2025). Salawu earned his PhD in English from the University of Alberta, and he is currently a

Black postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English, Toronto Metropolitan University.

Contact:

Instagram (external link)  | Bluesky (external link)  | LinkedIn (external link)