About this Event
The Goat’s Tongue is an interdisciplinary poetry collection that follows a girl, a goat, and an owl through the landscapes of vulnerability, belonging, memory, rejection, and forgiveness.
Rooted in Yoruba oral literature and born from Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye’s durational performance work Ori. Ara. Emi. (Ori. Ori. My Head), the collection moves between English and a symbolic language created by the author. Through poetry, folklore, performance, and visual script, Akintade-Oluwagbeye transforms a childhood memory of silence, dirt, goats, and isolation into a mythic inquiry into what it means to speak, to remember, and to become human.
Haunting, tender, and formally inventive, The Goat’s Tongue is a work of ancestral imagination and embodied poetics — a book about the hunger to belong, the pain of rejection, and the strange, sacred work of finding a voice.
Rooted in childhood memory, ancestral knowledge, and postcolonial questions of isolation and communication, The Goat’s Tongue bridges oral literature and the contemporary page, offering a haunting, intimate, and formally inventive work about the struggle to speak, the hunger for belonging, and the transformative power of poetry.
Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye, the 11th Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, is an African-Canadian interdisciplinary poet, oral historian, and chorus-poem playwright residing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Originally from Yorubaland, Nigeria, her work knits together folklore, abstract riddles, and Òwé Yorùbá elements of poetry to create a collective one-self.
She is the author of Earth Skin (2024), Equanimity in Sonder, Equanimity in Conversation, and The Taste of Sonder (2025). Her poetry-plays include Madness with Rocks (Obsidian Theatre; Playwrights Canada Press), Painted Elephant (Black Theatre Workshop), I Who I Am, and First Let Me Breathe (Theatre on the Beat).
Akintade-Oluwagbeye was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to Watch in 2026 by CIBWE. She is also the recipient of the 2022 RBC SaskArts Emerging Artist Award and the 2023 Platinum Jubilee Queen’s Medal. She served as the 2020–2021 Saskatchewan Youth Poet Laureate and the 2022 and 2023 READSaskatoon Poet Laureate. In 2025, The Goat’s Tongue won the International Metatron Poetry Prize.
A lover of humanity and humans, Peace can be found writing in scrolls, talking to pigeons, and organizing focus groups, festivals, and poetry workshops across Canada. Her goal is to introduce the power of traditional African (Yoruba) oral literature, storytelling, and performance art to the growing public of Saskatchewan and beyond.
“don’t be a stranger.”
Event venue & nearby stays
Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, Canada
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.