The term ‘urban’ has come to connote everything from city planning to the latest in hipster loft furniture. But above all that, it’s become synonymous with ‘black’ (as in ‘urban music’). That’s why indie publisher Gutter Press’ new imprint is called Urban Books.
To inaugurate Canada’s first black Canadian imprint, the first annual Toronto Urban Book Festival took over the corner of John and Richmond St. last week with a diverse series of literary readings, master classes and screenings headlined by Governor-General Award-winning author (and U of T prof) George Elliot Clarke and NYC filmmaker and cultural critic Nelson George.
Though Urban Books began this past fall, publisher Vanz Chapman decided to wait until February-Black History Month-to kick off the imprint in a big way. The idea for Urban Books was conceived and evolved through local alt-publishing company Gutter Press, which is dedicated to contemporary literature.
“Earlier this year super-agent Sam Hiyate [man about town, currently the in-house ‘social convenor’ at soon-to-be-opened hotspot Drake Hotel] published a book of mine, Reel Black: A Pop Culture Guide To Urban Movies,” explains Chapman. “This past summer I went to the annual Harlem Book Fair in New York City to sell the book, and while I was sweating my ass off up on Malcolm X Blvd. in Harlem, I noticed that all of the big publishers-Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Shuster, etc.-all had black imprints (Harlem Moon, Amistad, One World) that were putting out black-themed lit. So I came back to Toronto wanting to start the first black imprint here in Canada. I met with the new publisher at Gutter, Ed Sluga, he went over the idea with Sam and they both thought it would be a great idea, and we launched during Gutter’s 10th anniversary party this fall.”
While the Urban Books precept is to discover and showcase new African and Caribbean-Canadian voices, the imprint also wants to put emphasis on a hip-hop aesthetic.
“I think that for a lot of black people born in the 1970s and later, we came of age with hip-hop culture and it defined us much in the way that The Beatles, the Stones, etc. defined past generations, so I feel that extending that culture to literature is a natural progression,” Chapman notes.
Amongst the first titles being published by Urban Books is Chapman’s own novel Roam, which he describes as a funky urban take on The Odyssey that chronicles a young black man who leaves university in mid-semester and goes on an adventure to the UK before heading home to the West Indies.
Urban Books is also working on Black Canucks, an anthology of young black Canadian writers, and a sexual coming-of-age book, The Reluctant Hustler, by an exciting new Jamaican-Canadian writer.
Chapman’s diverse background makes him an ideal fit as overseer of such an exciting new initiative. A prominent member of the Canadian film industry (he was the creator, producer, and writer of VisionTV’s groundbreaking multicultural sitcom Lord Have Mercy, and was the senior story editor of CBC’s urban music drama Drop the Beat), he served as Writer-In-Residence at the Canadian Film Centre in 1997 and is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association.
“Story is story,” Chapman says simply. “Literature is my first love. I feel that by starting this imprint I’m going back to my creative roots. As a matter of fact, I got a tattoo this summer of a Ghanian symbol called ‘Sanfoka’, which means ‘to go back in order to go forward’, and I also chose it as the symbol for Urban Books-it just felt right.”
Though he’s a first-time publisher, Chapman already has great plans for his new imprint: “In the next five years, I want to have three great writers signed to Urban Books, two film adaptations of our books done, 20 books published, a Giller [Award] and an offer from Random House to buy the imprint with me hired as a consultant.”
