Parallels 03: The Moonlighters features texts by writer, urban and human geographer, Joy Russell on The Trinidad Moonlighters, a steel band active in North Shore Vancouver in the ’70s and ’80s; and reflections on the spirit of Carnival, Walk di road like she cyah touch the ground, by independent curator, writer, and artist Nya Lewis Williams.
Read more about it in the North Shore News
Born in Belize, Joy Russell is a writer and poet living in North Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, literary journals and anthologies in North America, the UK and Caribbean, including Artspeak, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, The Caribbean Writer, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry, Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, (2007, 2017). She has also worked in London, UK as a researcher and assistant producer for the television documentaries Rebel Music: The Bob Marley Story, Pump Up the Volume and BAFTA-nominated, The Hip Hop Years and is currently doing her MA in the Department of Geography at SFU.
Nya Lewis is an independent curator whose hybrid practice is rooted in the culmination of centuries of resistance, love, questions, actions, and study concerning diasporic cultural production. Their work reflects the diversity of intersectional, inter-generational, global indigenous, Queer critical discourse and its many forms of expression. Across the disciplines of art-making, programming, research, curating, and writing, Nya’s work with Canadian institutions—including the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, Capture, Vancouver Public library, Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver Art Gallery, grunt gallery, and Ref. (formerly Black Art Gastown), AfroQueer, Femme Art Review, Polygon, SFU Contemporary Art faculty, and UBC Equity and Inclusion—is driven by the possibilities of historical recovery, and the reimagining of community.