Addena Sumter-Freitag, Stay Black & Die

Addena Sumter-Freitag's Stay Black & Die is a funny and provocative play about growing up black in Winnipeg's North End during the 1950s and 60s. This one-woman play tells the story of a little girl called Penny. It's about growing up in a dysfunctional home, about being the only black family in Winnipeg's Post-World War II immigrant neighbourhood, and Penny's triumph in facing the injustices of sexism and racism. Sumter-Freitag takes the title from an expression her mother often used as she was growing up. "She realized by the time I came along, 'Let this kid know right away who she is, what's happening, what to expect.' So she always kept saying, 'You're black. You're going to stay black and die.'"

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November 2006

Fred Booker, Adventures in Debt Collection

The stories in Adventures in Debt Collection come freshly dispatched from the offices of Worldwide Finance Ltd. – a fictional collection house whose agents chase defaultees across the terrain of our multicultural society. Along the way, a bailiff tries to reconcile the legacy of his heroic black pioneer ancestor with his life as a contemporary repo man; a gang of children act with the precision of Sun Tzu to thwart the repossession of a local’s car; and a Japanese Canadian, who once passed for Cree after the WWII internment, is sent to a Native reservation to reclaim a wayward Nissan. Tracing fugitive vehicles and the people who belong to them, Fred Booker’s deftly-written tales range from the offices of over-extended capitalists to the driveways of the payment-missing masses, and all points in-between.

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