Troy Burle Bailey

Troy Burle Bailey’s stomping grounds in 1960s Northern Manitoba provided hockey, baseball and exploration activities in nearby forests while negotiating the opportunities of a mixed-ethnic background. His Africadian father and Polish-Ukrainian mother nurtured the diverse space in which Bailey learned the world. Drum lessons from jazz musician Delbert Wagner, self-taught art (he has sold ‘outsider’ paintings, sketches, and sculptures), producing/collaborating on dance, image/film loops, spoken word, and music with collective Moment Device for perfomance, encouraged Bailey’s creative stream in education. Bailey’s professional life includes gigs as FAS youth worker, waiter, retail salesperson, and freelance journalist. He graduated B.A.Creative Communications in 2002 and completed The Pierre Bonga Loops in 2010.

Fred Booker

Fred Booker came to Canada from the USA in 1966, where he contributed fiction, poetry, and essays to literary journals and anthologies throughout the next four decades. He also released three folk-blues albums with Rulebook Records in the 1970s. For several years, Booker worked in the Collection Department of General Motors Acceptance Corporation of Canada, where he was responsible for repossessing cars and trucks on seriously deliquent accounts. His volume of short fiction, Adventures in Debt Collection, was the inaugural edition from Commodore Books, and was reviewed in multiple periodicals, including The Vancouver Sun and The Georgia Straight. It was his first book. Two stories from this collection were dramatized on the CBC Radio One show Between the Covers in 2007. Booker died in Burnaby, BC in 2008 at the age of 69.

Crawford Kilian

Crawford Kilian was born in New York City in 1941, grew up in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and moved to Vancouver in 1967. He taught at Capilano College from 1968, when it opened, until retiring in 2008. He has written multiple novels, nonfiction books, and articles for online journals. His web site Pioneers: Blogging the Black Pioneers of British Columbia is an electronic supplement to the printed text of Go Do Some Great Thing.

Addena Sumter-Freitag

Addena Sumter-Freitag is a seventh-generation black Canadian with roots in Truro, Nova Scotia and Columbia, South Carolina. She grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, has lived in the Yukon, and now makes her home in Vancouver. She won Theatre BC’s National Playwriting Award and Centaur Theatre’s People’s Choice Award at the Montreal Fringe Festival for her autobiographical play Stay Black and Die. This is her first book.

Click here to go to Addena Sumter-Freitag's personal web site.