Cecil Foster

Cecil Foster is a Canadian novelist, essayist, journalist and scholar. He is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals on issues of citizenship, culture, multiculturalism, politics, race, ethnicity and immigration.

Foster has firsthand experience with these subjects. He was born in Barbados in 1954 and emigrated to Canada in 1978. He has been a reporter for various newspapers and was editor of Contrast, Canada’s first Black-oriented newspaper, and a senior editor for The Financial Post. He has also worked for the CBC in radio and television, and for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Foster’s nonfiction book, “Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom” (McGill-Queen’s UP 2007), won the 2008 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award by the Canadian Sociology Association. An earlier nonfiction work, “A Place Called Heaven: The Meaning of Being Black in Canada,” won the 1996 Gordon Montador Award for the Best Canadian Book on Contemporary Social Issues. “Sleep On, Beloved,” a novel, was shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Book Prize.

A more complete of Foster’s books is available on his personal website. In 2015, Foster was one of five jurors selected to choose the winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of Canada’s most prestigious and closely watched literary awards.

Cecil Foster, PhD
Professor of Transnational Studies in the Department of Africana and American Studies
University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences

• 716-645-0786
• cecilfos@buffalo.edu
• Cecil Foster’s website