The University of Alberta Press recently published 100 Days, a collection of poetry written by Liu Scholar Juliane Okot Bitek, who is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Students Graduate Program at the University of British Columbia.
For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem. Okot Bitek draws on her own family’s experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father – the poet Okot p’Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop.
To purchase the book, click here. Learn more about Juliane Okot Bitek’s work by visiting her profile.
Ikhide R. Ikheloa, from Reading and Writing… Loudly, posted this to his blog:
“Bitek’s ability to connect with the beauty and pain of human suffering seems supernatural, this ability to give voice to those who seem to have no voices. Bitek wrote this book with her blood and it shows…. Bitek is a gifted seer, she sees tomorrow with a sweet but earthy, guttural voice, voice of the masquerade…. [Bitek] takes the reader to places in the heart that the writer never intended or imagined. That is powerful, how she makes 100 Days a deeply personal journey to each reader.”
Launch Event
Join the launch event / reading of 100 Days by Juliane Okot Bitek on June 10, 7:30 to 9:30pm at Selectors’ Records, 8 E. Pender St., Vancouver BC Canada, V6A 1T1.
With readings by Jordan Scott and Cecily Nicholson.
More details to come.
