Adebe DeRango-Adem, who also goes by Adebe D. A., is a writer whose words travel between Toronto and New York City. She recently completed her MA at York University, where she also served as Assistant Editor for the arts and literary journal, Existere. Her work has been published in various North American sources, such as The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, CV2 and the Toronto Star. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto's first Junior Poet Laureate. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, Sea Change (Burning Effigy Press, 2007) and in 2008, attended the summer writing program at Naropa University, where she mentored with Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. To her delight, and during her tenure at Naropa, she produced a significant body of work; several poems, which made it into her most recent collection. Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was published this year by Frontenac House, one of ten manuscripts chosen in honour of Frontenac House's Dektet 2010 competition, using a blind selection process by a jury of leading Canadian writers: bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, and Alice Major. Ex Nihilo is a collection attuned to the creative process as a phenomenon of the will to move on (ex-) from nihilistic attitudes (nihilo), and in so doing (according to its original Latin etymology) create “something out of nothing.” Charged with the political, Ex Nihilo is a poetic text that considers how art can respond to the annihilation of particular identities struggling to exist in an impossibly post-racial world, framed against the possibility that art and identity are creations ex nihilo whose immateriality allow us to engage in endless discursive creativity, as we travel and endlessly (re)create ourselves.

Ex Nihilo (Frontenac House, 2010)