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Bookends by Harry Vandervlist Wayde Compton's book 49th Parallel Psalm is about black settlers in B.C. after 1858: "black like wax tracks. / free-at-last markets. black / like the invisible hand...." Maybe you can tell from those few words that Compton wittily samples and re-mixes music and politics and history and verse. It works. Compton's book was reviewed here in the summer and he was profiled in these pages around WordFest time. If you managed to miss all that, you can catch Compton with Calgary's Claire Harris, author of Drawing Down a Daughter and Dipped in Shadow. Both read this Saturday, February 19 at Bow Valley College (332 - 6th Avenue SE). The readings are at 6 p.m., and a screening of Selwyn Jacob's film The Road Taken follows. Admission is pay what you can, and it’s all part of Black History Month. Nominees for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize include Calgary's Peter Oliva, for his 1999 novel City of Yes. Oliva's in good company with fellow nominees Caroline Adderson, Alistair Macleod, Elyse Gasco and Judy MacDonald. Apologies for the garbled bit in last week's column: the description of Bill Friends's anthology should have read: "What Friend has done is to take poems that get put into anthologies all the time (perhaps Keats' Odes? Earl Birney's "David"?) and rewritten them." And don't skip Lunch: Lydia, that is, who offers a midnight performance this Friday, February 18 at Big Secret Theatre, following the Ground Zero production of Killer Joe. Expect some sex-advice column excerpts and stories of sexual obsession – all very late at night. You have to go to Edmonton's Jubilee Auditorium to do it, but Friday, February 25 offers a rare chance to hear one of the 20th century's acclaimed writers. Wole Soyinka was born in 1934 in western Nigeria. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 after nearly 30 years of work as a playwright, poet, novelist, human rights advocate and visiting professor at places like Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Cornell. He has most recently been acclaimed, by the Village Voice, for example, for his 1996 book The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigeria Crisis. The U of C's African Studies Research Group is organizing buses to Edmonton for $30. For more info call 220-6516 or go to http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~afstgp/.

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