news | Friday October 30, 2026

Hot Off the Press! Grace of Centuries Has Arrived!

Twenty years in the making, a new book by Victoria-based poet Hope Anderson is here! Anderson’s new book of poetry Grace of Centuries is a researched, moving celebration of Black voices across centuries and continents. Beginning with the African presence in the Bible and travelling through inheritances both collective and personal, Anderson features figures such as Bilali Muhammad, Queen Nzinga, and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges to Gannibal, John Ware, Phillis Wheatley, and more. In so doing, he intervenes in a legacy that for so long did not offer welcome or embrace to so many.

An excerpt from “Grace of Centuries”

“I sailed around Monte Cristo
Having carried Florence in my heart
Yet could not replace Mercédès
Whose story is my morning dew
And Santo Domingo
I can’t outgrow, soaked in my blood
Someday the emperor himself
Without irony
Is imprisoned in le Château de Ham
Before finding the Decree of Memphis
The heartbreak sound found
On two great rivers
As my forebears
In le château de ma peau
Though the difference between
Patriotism and villainy is a matter of dates
Another would remove the chains
that pained my ancestral mère
Whose name my nom de plume
Dumas bears the stamp of the land
The bearing of an abandoned love
When I spoke, a few would listen
Moral wounds may be hidden
But never closed”