Talk by Chantal Gibson

Chantal Gibson: What does it mean to decolonize your mind?

March 8, 2021
4:00 - 5:15 pm CST

Pre-register on zoom


Along with The University of Winnipeg's English Department, Gallery 1C03 is very pleased to host a public presentation by artist-writer, and educator Chantal Gibson as part of the English Department’s Black Writing in Canada Virtual Speaker Series. 

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning teacher-artist living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. As a visual artist and arts educator, her work confronts systemic racism and colonialism head-on, imagining BIPOC voices in the spaces and silences left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her art has appeared in museums and cultural institutions across Canada. Most notably, in a national response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Gibson’s altered text “Who’s Who?” currently sits in the Senate of Canada Building until June 2021 as part of the first installation of work by Black artists.

As a literary artist, Gibson published her debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press) in January 2019. Currently on curricular readings lists across the country, HSR is Gibson’s creative response to her own encounters with racism in the classroom. The book she wished she had in school, this English grammar insurrection celebrates Black womanhood in Canadian art, literature, history and pop-culture as it unpacks settler-colonialism in the fill-in-the ____ lessons she consumed as a child. Winner of the 2020 Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for best book in BC, How She Read was shortlisted for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. Named one of CBC Books 24 Canadian Writers on the Rise in 2020, Gibson is an award-winning teacher in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU.

About the book: http://caitlin-press.com/our-books/how-she-read/

This event is made possible with financial assistance from the League of Canadian Poets and The Canada Council for the Arts through The Writers’ Union of Canada.