Bertrand Bickersteth

Bertrand Bickersteth’s second book is not an easy one to quantify.

Part memoir, part regional history of Alberta and the Black cowboys and ranchers who lived and worked there, Numinous Animal: Tracing the Afrofuturism of Black Cowboys (Athabasca University Press) also describes the visual work Bickersteth undertook as he explored the cattle brands used by these Black cowboys and turned them into a typeface.

“This book is a journey through my sense of self: how I connect myself to Alberta, how I connect Alberta’s history to the history of Blackness across this continent, and how I connect that history of Blackness across this continent to Canadian identity itself,” Bickersteth says. 

He wrote the book when he served as writer-in-residence at Athabasca University for the 2024–2025 academic year. Producing a book as a record of his tenure was a requirement of the position, and Bickersteth says it is something he could not have created at any other time. In a phone call before he started in the role, Angie Abdou, a writer and professor at Athabasca University, and member of the committee for the writer-in-residence program, told him he shouldn’t feel any pressure about the book.

And so he didn’t. That freedom allowed Bickersteth to simply write without worrying about where the writing would take him. 

“The only way I could have written this book was being in the situation that I was as the writer-in-residence,” he says. “I think in any other situation I would have allowed the questions I had at the very beginning – What are you doing exactly? Where is this going? – I think I would have allowed that to censor my writing and it would have changed entirely.”

Bickersteth has long seen Blackness as something that is perceived to be anomalous in Canada – growing up in Alberta, he often felt he was seen as singular because of his identity. Through his writing, including in his debut collection The Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies, Bickersteth says he is trying to counter the idea that Black history in Canada is “singular or ephemeral.” 

This work led him one step further – to the creation of the Black cowboy font, a typeface that Bickersteth designed based on the cattle brands of the Black cowboys he was researching. The decision to undertake the project was instinctive and the development of the font took several years. He explains this process, accompanied by annotated diagrams, in Numinous Animal. 

The Poetics of Black Cattle Brands. Image created by Bertrand Bickersteth. (from Numinous Animal, Athabasca University Press)

Text became Bickersteth’s medium: the forms and text of historical cattle brands were used to counter the notion of Black ephemerality. 

“For me, cattle brands are a form of literature,” he says. “It just made sense to go back [into history] and use those examples of Black presence, their actual imprints, their imaginative designs, and to pull that into the present.”

The font already has a life beyond the book: it is available for download on Bickersteth’s website, and will be used in his sophomore book of poems, expected next year from House of Anansi Press. Some of the poems about the Black cowboys he wrote about in Numinous Animal will be typeset in the font, placing verse in conversation with its subjects. 

“Some of these poems in my mind are going to be a collaboration, since the poems will be about the Black cowboys whose cattle brands I used to make the font,” Bickersteth says. “In a sense, they’ll be writing their own poems through the font. I love that idea.”