In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe present the stories of frontline workers, advocates, and people living without homes during the pandemic. The book uses prose, poetry, and photography to document lived experiences of homelessness, responses to the housing crisis, efforts to fight back for homes, and possible solutions to move Toronto forward. Contributors provide particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a humanitarian disaster.

Greg Cook lives in Saint John, New Brunswick. His biography One Heart, One Way / Alden Nowlan: A Writer’s Life was published by Pottersfield Press. His latest book of poetry, Songs of the Wounded: new and selected poems, was publshed by Black Moss. He edited Alden Nowlan: Essays on His Works for Guernica Editions. He is currently writing a biography of another friend, novelist Ernest Buckler, whose novel The Mountain and the Valley is a seminal Canadian classic.

Greg Cook's profile page

Cathy Crowe is a recipient of the Order of Canada and a pioneer of street nursing. She is currently a public affiliate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. She has fostered numerous coalitions and advocacy initiatives that have achieved significant public policy victories, including the 1998 Disaster Declaration. She is the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home and producer of the Home Safe documentary series. Her work is the subject of the documentary Street Nurse, by filmmaker Shelley Saywell.

Cathy Crowe's profile page

Robyn Maynard is an award-winning author and Black feminist. Her published works include Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017), a national bestseller, as well as numerous works published in academic and trade anthologies. She has a long history of involvement supporting grassroots activism against racial profiling, incarceration, detention, and deportation in Toronto and Montreal, and is currently a Vanier Scholar at the University of Toronto.

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Shawan Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (McClelland & Steward, 2016), Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House, 2010), and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (Coach House, 2014). He is a weekly columnistat the Toronto Star and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent,Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the Universityof Toronto and was a 2011–12 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College.In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, heco-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary projectthat spread to over twenty-five cities globally.

Shawn Micallef's profile page