David Austin offers nothing less than a radical geography of black art in his (re)sounding of Linton Kwesi Johnson. You don't play with Johnson's revolutionary poetry, Austin teaches, and Dread Poetry and Freedom is as serious, and beautiful, as our life. --Fred Moten, poet, critic and theorist

'A moving and dialogic musing on freedom. Austin's richly textured study reads LKJ's poetry in relation to an expansive tradition of black radical politics and poetics. It captures both the urgency of Johnson's historical moment and his resonance for ours' --Shalini Puri, Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

'With the intensity of a devotee and the precision of a scholar, David Austin skillfully traverses the dread terrain of Linton Kwesi Johnson's politics and poetry, engaging readers in an illuminating dialogue with diverse interlocutors who haunt the writer's imagination' --Carolyn Cooper, cultural critic, author of 'Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture'

David Austin is the author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (BTL, 2013) - Winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize - and editor of You Don't Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (AK Press, 2009). His most recent book is Dread, Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (Pluto, 2018). He currently teaches in the Department of Humanities, Philosophy and Religion at John Abbott College.