Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
Afua [Ava Pamela] Cooper was born on November 8, 1957, in the Whithorn district of Westmoreland, Jamaica. She moved to Canada in December 1980 as a direct result of the increasing political violence in Jamaica. After the birth of her son Akil in July 1981, Cooper worked as an instructor at Bickford Park High School in Toronto, but she was already beginning to perform her poetry at Toronto's spoken word venues. Her first book of poetry, Breakin Chains, was published in 1983, the same year that she enrolled at the University of Toronto to major in African Studies. In 1988 she took up a residency fellowship at Banff School of Fine Arts and wrote two books of poetry, The Red Caterpillar on College Street (1989), for children, and Memories Have Tongue (1992), which was a finalist in the 1992 Casa de las Americas Award. Currently, Dr, Cooper serves as a full professor at Dalhousie University’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology with cross-appointments in the Department of History and Gender and Women Studies.