After months of organizing and reading and emailing and editing and proofreading and laughing and hair-pulling and everything else that happens when you put a book together, on behalf of me and my co-editor, Andrea Thompson, I would like to finally present our book, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out. It has finally been published with Inanna Publications.
We are launching the book in Toronto Thursday, December 9th at 6:30 p.m., and will be taking place at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord Street). You can read more about the historic bookstore here.
OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT is an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, as well as black and white artwork and photography, that explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis.
If you are in Toronto, please do come and support. Refreshments will be served. Authors will read at 7:15 p.m.
We are also working on setting up launches elsewhere in North America, so please stay tuned. If you would like a review copy of Other Tongues, please do send me a message by visiting the Contact section of my blog.
We received so many contributions to the book that it was near impossible to envision the finished product, with firm decisions about which to include. There are many factors we had to look for (some which were logistical, and part of Inanna’s requirements for length, etc.) in order to produce the final product. But one thing that remained consistent was how impressed we were with the quality of everyone’s work. Truly. Andrea and I had many “eureka” moments, realizing our stories were shared by so many women across North America… questions about who/what we were, what it was like growing up, and continued struggles (and blessings) we face today. What a ride.
Finalizing a book that is all about the evolution of racial identity – a book shaped by the multidimensional space and ever-changing horizon of what being mixed means – is close to impossible. Our project is, in many ways, much larger than a single book – it is voluminous, literally and figuratively. We see this finished product as part of history not merely by virtue of its eventual place on the shelves of bookstores and universities, but by its will to ignite a new sense of community amongst mixed-race women in North America. And what better time than now??
We thank you deeply for your encouragement and support. Please stay updated about the book on Facebook and on here, where dialogues on the interracial experience will continue.
Warm regards,
Adebe DeRango-Adem
Co-editor, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out
Praise for OTHER TONGUES
“In a fresh approach to the quest for understanding mixed-race identity in the Americas, the multiple genres that find their way into the Other Tongues anthology — from poetry to photography, fiction to scholarship — perfectly mirror the prodigious spectrum of their authors’ positions toward the topic. This collection speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by ‘weI mean not only women of mixed-race ancestry, but all citizens of 21st-century North America.”
– Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity“These exciting, beautifully inked narratives tell us that, as each woman embraces her biracial or multiracial identity, she mothers a new world, one with equal space for everyone.”
– George Elliott Clarke, Africadian & Eastern Woodland Metis, Laureate, 2001 Governor-General�s Award for Poetry“Passionate, courageous and insightful, Other Tongues speaks affectingly about the pleasures and paradoxes of living between the conventional categories of race. It is a significant anthology, one that I’ve been waiting for.”
– Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor, Black Canadian Literature and Diaspora Studies, University of Toronto
