Karina Vernon researches and teaches in the area of Canadian literature, with a special focus on black Canadian literature, archives, critical race theory, multiculturalism and decolonization. She is currently finishing her first book, Black Atlantis: A Recovered Archive of Black Prairie Writing, which brings to light a previously hidden archive of literature, from the eighteenth-century black fur traders to contemporary writers. She is also at work on a second SSHRC-funded project titled Black Art and the Aesthetics of Spatial Justice. This book examines the aesthetic strategies black artists in Canada, the U.S. and Latin America have developed to respond to urban renewal processes which destroy black neighbourhoods. She was a co-founder and editor of Commodore Books, the first literary press in western Canada.