Join artist-writer Chantal Gibson, poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and SFU librarian Ebony Magnus for a night of readings and reflection, as they discuss un/settled, the towering, photo-poetic art installation at the corner of Hastings and Richards that drapes Black womanhood over 240 ft2 of SFU Belzberg Library’s street-front windows. In conversation, the panelists will consider what it means to centre Black bodies in the downtown landscape, and to reimagine how spaces closed by the pandemic can open dialogues about justice, solidarity, and the beauty of Black lives. All three live and work with gratitude on the unceded, traditional, ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples.

Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator working in the overlap between literary and visual art, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, most notably the Senate of Canada. Her debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, literature. It won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. She teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is a poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016) was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya is also the author of Sublime: Lost Words (The Elephants 2018). She is the 2020 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University and a 2021 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow, also at Simon Fraser University.

Ebony Magnus is the Head Librarian at Simon Fraser University’s Samuel and Frances Belzberg Library in downtown Vancouver. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of British and a Masters of Arts in English Literature from Carleton University. Through her work in libraries, she seeks to undermine myths of neutrality and challenge oppressive power structures while creating space for community growth and sustenance.