news | Sunday February 1, 2026

Black History and Black Futures Month 2026

It’s Black History and Black Futures Month! If you’re looking to check out some top-tier titles by Black authors, we have some new books (and some still to come!) that we’d love to introduce to you. We’d like to shine a spotlight on:

Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson. Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.

Of Crowd Source, The Grind says “Nicholson applies her capacious, multi-dimensional imagination to the covenly world of crows. Her language dances like light on water, moving from corvid facts to industrial history, from formal play to anti-colonial instruction, ever restless and shimmering. Nicholson employs mischief as a texture of movement, collective responsibility as a pathway to embodiment. This book is not meant to be just read, but practised.”

Pick up your copy of Crowd Source here.

Perhaps you’ve had the pleasure of reading an except of allostatic load by Junie Désil on your commute as part of Books BC, BC Transit, and Translink’s Poetry in Transit Program? If you haven’t had the opportunity to read the whole thing, allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, an ongoing pandemic, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, this collection invites readers to hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well, in a world that is inflamed and consequently inflames us, in a world where true restoration and health must co-occur with the planet and with each other.

The British Columbia Review says, “this is a book that… touches and changes deep perceptions.”

Pick up your copy here.

Have you checked out the debut publication of Black, Jewish playwright Sarah Waisvisz? Heartlines imagines the lives and loves of activists, artists, gender pioneers, and queer couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore who resisted the nazis in 1940s Europe.

Broadway World says of Heartlines: “the writing is fast paced, keeping the story flowing.”

Order your copy of Heartlines here.

Coming soon to bookstores near you is the brand new play Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life by Caroline Russell-King and debut author Maria Crooks! Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life is a flight of fancy based on the incredible life of sculptor Dr. Selma Hortense Burke, who lived from 1900 to 1995, approximately 49,932,000 minutes. Here, imagined, are ninety of them, in a play that asks, “Who gets to make art, and who gets to destroy it?”

Pre-order your copy of Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life here.

We hope your Black History and Black Futures Month is vibrant with books that stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them.