The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis (CBP) is animated by the intricacies of kinship rooted in Africa, its diasporas, and the loving poetry that shapes Black life and relations. 

Poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan referred to Black Studies as “Life Studies,” which contributes to worldmaking and strengthens our ecologies of thought. Black Studies allows us to see the future in the present, to transform what “is” in favour of what could be, or what exists despite interlocking systems of oppression—racial capitalism, imperialism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, and more—that place carceral-colonial limits on our imagination.

More than mainstream understandings of poetry, black poiēsis enacts the production of what is “more than.” 

The CBP is a space where transnational cultural workers, educators, researchers, activists, system-impacted community members, and underrepresented or marginalised youth think collaboratively and act creatively—between and beyond difference—in loving study and production of Black life and memory work.

CBP initiatives are structured through a syncretic pairing of epistemological containers. 

Collectively, this offers multivalent pathways to envision, study, and enact black aesthetic interventions and community formations. We privilege the multiplicity of traditions ushered forth by black poiēsis and black poetics as a shared foundation for organising with precision and care. As one of the first spaces of this scope in Canada, we see ourselves as makers and maintainers—working to enact change, transform our studies, and navigate liberatory practices that keep us rooted as we imagine the world we want.

The University of Toronto is situated within the ongoing, asymmetric process of increasing a robust, well-resourced presence of Black and Indigenous people and their knowledges. 

Physically located in Tkaronto—a meeting place for many Indigenous and transnational traditions of Black study, histories of Black life, liberation struggles, and creative organisation with varying degrees of institutional support. CBP operates in relation to these communities and their needs. We think critically about creative technologies, mixed-media collaborative methods, and sustaining theories of black studies as our core practice.

Our goal is to enrich the deepening public infrastructure of Black Studies in arts and education across Canada, greater Turtle Island, and globally. 

We are building networks, undertaking collaborative projects, and orienting our individual work (disciplinary, epistemological, and otherwise embodied) towards a transformed public invested in what Katherine McKittrick calls “black livingness.”