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Minister Faust Writer Speaker Community Organiser |
Minister Faust is a long-time community activist, writer, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker and martial artist in several disciplines. A lifelong fan of science fiction, his earliest memories of the genre were watching Star Trek: The Original Series in black & white and having his mother read to him from Robert Heinlein's Red Planet. After deciding to become a comic book writer and artist when he was ten, he secretly changed his ambition to science fiction novelist after glancing through the glossary to Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd planned to become an ecologist so as to gain Herbert's ecological depth, but before his first university class switched his entire enrollment to English Literature, having concluded that learning to write was more relevant to the career of a writer, and that going to endless lab classes at 7 am for four years would likely suck. As a member of E-Town's anti-fascist movement in 1990, he and other youth marched on a Nazi skinhead gang house, the hub at that time of a series of violent assaults. Confronted there by skinheads with guns, Minister Faust held them back with nothing but the power of his words. Thus began a speaking career that has taken him across Canada and before of crowds in the tens of thousands. Minister Faust taught English Literature in E-Town junior high and high schools for a decade, and later worked a mentor and trainer for the Keshotu Leadership Academy, an Africentric organisation whose manual he wrote. A radio broadcaster since 1989, he hosts Africentric Radio (formerly The Terrordome), for which he's interviewed luminaries such as Tariq Ali, Molefi Kete Asante, Martin Bernal, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D., Austin Clarke, Angela Davis, Karl Evanzz, Tom Fontana, Glen Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, Reginald Hudlin, Ice-T, Janine Jackson, Michael Parenti, Ishmael Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Vandana Shiva, David Simon, Scott Taylor, and many more. As a radio and print journalist, he's gone as far as the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, and to the Ain-al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, to collect stories and hear directly from people living and making history. A maverick novelist increasingly described as one of the finest voices of his generation, Minister Faust is the author of the critically acclaimed The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and the Kindred Award-winning Shrinking the Heroes. His latest is The Alchemists of Kush, which writers and readers alike have already hailed as superb; novelist Sparkle Hayter calls the book "brilliant." Minister Faust refers to his sub-genre of writing as Imhotep-Hop-an Africentric literature that draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars. He lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughters, where he also runs Canada's top bean pie bakery, Desserts of Kush. |