And I Alone Escaped to Tell You

Sylvia D. Hamilton is a filmmaker and writer whose awards include a Gemini and the Portia White Prize. Her poetry has been published in The Dalhousie Review, West Coast Line, The Great Black North and Untying the Apron: Daughters Remember Mothers of the Fifties. She was a contributor to, and co-editor of, We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays In African Canadian Women’s History. She lives in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.

The settlement of African peoples in Nova Scotia is a richly layered story encompassing many waves of settlement and diverse circumstances?from captives to ‘freedom runners’ who sailed north from the United States with hopes of establishing a new life. The poems in And I Alone Escaped to Tell You endeavour to give these historical events a human voice, blending documentary material, memory, experience and imagination to evoke the lives of these early Black Nova Scotians and of the generations that followed. This collection is a moving meditation on the place of African-descended people in the Canadian story and on the threads connecting all of us to the African diaspora.

Finalist for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry.