Room with a View

After much careful deliberation by our judge, Catherine Hernandez, author of award-winning Scarborough and and the forthcoming I Promise, the shortlist is finally here. Congratulations to the three writers, whose short stories were handpicked by our judge!

The results are in! Congratulations to the following artists on winning Room’s fourth Cover Art Contest! You can find the first place winner’s work on the cover of our very next issue, 42.2, and the second place winner featured in the same issue. We want to give a huge shout-out to our judge Syrus Marcus Ware for going through the pool of submissions and determining the shortlist and winners. And thank you to all who submitted and shared... more

Gibson is a Vancouver-based artist and educator whose work plunges into the fraught territory of school texts and history books with a sewing needle and re-works historical Canadian texts with black thread in order to revise our ideas of history, nationhood, and how we read. Through altered book sculptures that ensnare the texts with braids and thread, redacted texts, and reprints of old children’s readers, Gibson’s work asks us to consider... more

At Room, we don’t just look to the past but we also look to the future and it’s looking very bright. Here are some of our favourite black emerging writers who you should be paying attention to. Image: Chimedum Ohaegbu.

Each year when February rolls around there is a sudden influx of content, online, in libraries and elsewhere, featuring black writers, artists, activists and historical moments and figures. Much of the focus looks to the past and while that’s important, we at Room want to also centre writers in the here and now, and also look to the future. Here is a list of some of our most beloved black Canadian women and non-binary writers to enjoy all... more