What wilderness seethes beneath the skin? Knowing your wild potential, is it possible to live a life both urban and urbane? ‘Urbane’ continues the stories of the people, human and otherwise, we met in ‘Humane’, Anna Marie Sewell's best-selling first novel (Stonehouse, 2020).

Hazel LeSage and her lawyer friend Shanaya set out to find Hazel's ex-husband and renegotiate the terms of their divorce, in which Hazel unjustly lost her land. Exploring Hazel’s former home, they stumble into a deadly conspiracy entangling the rural lands surrounding their home city of Amiskwaciy.

Meanwhile in Amiskwaciy, Hazel's pregnant firebrand daughter Missy struggles with all-day morning sickness and wild mood swings. Father-to-be Maengan struggles with their child's possibly monstrous heritage. Missy's cousin Devin, shaken to the core by the violent events recounted in ‘Humane’, has gone to ground in an unlikely lair. To emerge whole, like all of them, he must come to grips with the primal wildness of his soul.

Devin's mentor Father Efren is no help; he's fallen in love, and that primal wildness might, for the second time in his life, cost him everything. Welcome back to Amiskwaciy, where the mythic has its feet up on your coffee table, and what you see might not be all you get.

Anna Marie Sewell is an award-winning multi-genre writer/performer, whose career has centred around collaborative multidisciplinary work, including Ancestors & Elders, Reconciling Edmonton (which featured the first ever Round Dance at Edmonton's City Hall), Braidings, Honour Songs and Heart of the Flower. As Edmonton's 4th Poet Laureate, Anna Marie created and curated The PoemCatcher public art installation. She founded and ran Big Sky Theatre, a three year training and performance project producing original Aboriginal (it was the 90s) theatre with urban youth. She is also a founding member of the Stroll of Poets, which has provided an entrée into Edmonton's public poetry community since 1991.

Anna Marie authored two critically-acclaimed (and much-shortlisted) poetry collections, Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009), and 2018's For the Changing Moon: Poems & Songs (Thistledown Press). Her essays and articles appear in Eighteen Bridges, Alberta Views, New Trail, Write Magazine, Legacy and various scholarly publications. She's even had a recipe published in a cookbook.

Humane is Anna Marie's first novel. She drafted it with support from an Edmonton Artist Trust Fund award, and finished it as part of her tenure as MacEwan University's 2019/20 Writer in Residence, a gig which has also entailed performing with a 24 piece orchestra, co-producing 2 multilingual poetry & song showcases, and collaborating with an array of artists and educators. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Anna Marie Sewell's profile page

“Sewell sheds a light on how our individual and collective histories—of both trauma and love—shape who we are and our responsibilities to each other.” — Y. Dirks, Alberta Views

“A riotous mystery set in a mystical city, Humane takes us on a mind-bending journey.” — Judy Rebick, rabble.ca (http://rabble.ca)

“It’s a wonderful read, a significant addition to the canon of authentic Indigenous crime novel.

”

— Wayne Arthurson

“...Not the kitschy aboriginal rattles and moccasin soft-shoe of urban aboriginal after pre-European roots, but the real mean deal... Ms. Sewell has developed the slinky moves to slide like smoke over or under most barricades.” —Northern Poetry Review

“Sewell brings a genuine, specific voice to this landscape, through words that are muscular, though simple, and which come like breath or singing.” —The Malahat Review

“Raw, wide-eyed and palpably electric, this is wonderful stuff… ” —The Globe and Mail