TEAMMATES AND OTHER STORIES is a collection of creative non-fiction, short stories and at least one long story by Jeff Roulston, his first in print. Like the poetry in his two chapbooks Toronto The Good and The City With Heart, Jeff’s stories are both hopeful and devastating, real and sometimes very raw. They all follow Black boys, teenagers and young men struggling to learn, grow and love in settings that might be new to some readers: the rough edges of Jeff’s hometown of Toronto, the campuses of historically Black colleges in the southern United States and the often cutthroat cubicles of corporate Canada. Also look out for Jeff Roulston’s forthcoming debut novel The Phenom in 2020.
THE CITY WITH HEART is the second poetry chapbook by Jeff Roulston, known to many is his community as Jeff The Writer. He subscribes to the newest, realest movement in creative writing, known as The BreakBeat Poets, a generation of poets, lyricists and activists reared on and inspired by hip-hop culture. This is a collection of love and hate poems dedicated to his hometown of Toronto, which his spoken word-inspired poetry describes as a schizophrenic place, both happy and painful, equally wealthy and morally destitute.
The poems in Jeff Roulston’s first chapbook Toronto The Good are descriptive, dark, angry and optimistic all at once. His lyrical, spoken word- and hip-hop-influenced style represents his Toronto upbringing and his pointed poetry lays out the best and worst of his hometown.