pauldbwatkins Event, Literature

WATERMELON SEEDS FESTIVAL OF LITERATURE

I will be reading at the Second annual Watermelon Seeds Festival of Literature.

Internationally acclaimed and award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, and journalists read in solidarity with the Palestinian people in a time of genocide. The Festival features Lucy Alford (Forms of Poetic Attention), Duha Alshaqaqi (We Are Not Numbers), Danielle Janess (The Milk of Amnesia), El Jones (Abolitionist Intimacies), Sonnet L’Abbé (Sonnet’s Shakespeare), Leila Marshy (My Thievery of the People), Nyla Matuk (Stranger), Philip Kevin Paul (Little Hunger), Ziyad Saadi (Three Parties), Neil Surkan (Unbecoming), Craig Taylor (New Yorkers), Saeed Teebi (Her First Palestinian), Paul db Watkins (Soundin’ Canaan). A hybrid event with readings on site and by video.

More details, here.

pauldbwatkins Academic, Event, Lecture

Event at Victoria Festival of Authors

Hey Victoria and Island folk,

You are invited to join me, along with d’bi.young anitafrika, Wayde Compton, and Sonnet L’Abbé, for performances and conversation that embody and expand on the wide-ranging power of human sound to make, unmake, and remake the ways in which we feel, engage with, and know ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Visit victoriafestivalofauthors.ca for more information and tickets, as well as an interview by yours truly: Q&A with Paul db Watkins.

Event Details
📅 Friday, October 17 · 2:00 PM PDT
📍 Langham Court Theatre
805 Langham Court, Victoria, BC V8V 4J3

pauldbwatkins Literature, Music, Poetry, soundin canaan

From the Stage to the Site: Wayde Compton Interview and Soundin’ Canaan Updates

The website for my book is nearly complete — the final piece, a “create your own remix” section, is on its way.

Recently, I added audio and photos from the Victoria Book Launch on March 13. A huge shoutout to Susan Sanford Blades for organizing the event as part of the Wild Prose reading series (https://www.susansanfordblades.com/wild-prose-reading-series). 

After a remixed reading of my book, I sat down for an on-stage interview with Wayde Compton. This was an incredible full circle moment, and audio (as well as a transcript) are now available as well.

I’ve also added a new remix to the Remix section: “Kind of Blue in Green (for GEC),” which reimagines Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” and offers a poetic riff/reading of George Elliott Clarke’s “Bluing Green.”

Head over to www.soundincanaan.com to explore this new material and more from the book. If you don’t have a copy yet, you can grab one here — and save 20% all April with the code POETRY2025.

pauldbwatkins Literature, Poetry

Preorder Soundin’ Canaan at 50% Off Today!

Hi friends,

I’m thrilled to announce that my debut academic book, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, will be released on January 21, 2025! The Press is currently celebrating its 50th Anniversary with a sale, so you can preorder the book at 50% off until December 15 using the code WLUP50. (Canada and US only).

Using a DJ Methodology, I blend close readings of poetry, music, cultural and literary history, along with interviews with the poets featured in the book. It also includes an accompanying soundtrack of playlists to enhance your reading experience, and a website is forthcoming.

You can learn more and preorder the book here: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/S/Soundin-Canaan

All my best,
Paul db Watkins

Reviews

“Soundin’ Canaan is an imaginative, innovative, original, and immensely generative study of the relations that connect Canadian Black poetry to music, multiculturalism, social membership, and citizenship.”
–George Lipsitz, University of California-Santa Barbara, author of The Danger Zone Is Everywhere (University of California Press, 2024)

“In Soundin’ Canaan: Black Canadian Poetry, Music, and Citizenship, Can-Lit-Crit scholar Paul db Watkins “brings da noise,” reading through Afro-Can poets to stress that our concern is to remix, adapt, sample, and echo African Diasporic literary and musical greats in confraternity or confrontation with the Bards of the Great White World—and of the Great White North.

Watkins is himself an adept DJ, scribing a bluesaic (not prosaic) and a Rap-sodic exploration of how a quintet of Black Can poets kick-start the toppling of Plato and his reactionaries, who dread that any shift in musical taste is equivalent to an insurrection of the masses. Well, so be it! Watkins is the polyphonous polymath, not just reading the words, but listening for and sounding the Rastafarian aesthetics that trouble Luciferian ethics. In short, Watkins reads Black Can poems as mosaics of transgressive conjunctions. He is himself the Sage of the Remix, and intersperses his prose with shout-outs to YouTube videos and Spotify tracks of pertinent artistes. His playlist? Shakespeare and Shad; Ma Rainey and Martin Luther King. You read this book; you’re now in the know. Why? Cos now ya’s in the groove….”
—George Elliott Clarke, author of Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Press) & J’Accuse…! (Poem Versus Silence) (Exile Editions)