It's no surprise that Toronto artist Mustafa has made waves with his first album. Since releasing When Smoke Rises in May, the poet has made his television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, collected rave reviews from critics and has now earned a spot on the Polaris Music Prize shortlist.

The Polaris Prize annually celebrates the best Canadian album of the year, awarding the artist $50,000. There are 10 albums on the shortlist. The winner will be announced on Sept. 27, 2021.

When Smoke Rises is an album of low-key pop and indie folk songs full of mourning and love and family. Mustafa sings about protecting Black lives, losing friends who have become family and the violence that has marked his young life in Toronto's Regent Park housing project.

Mustafa started making local headlines at the age of 12, after releasing an original spoken word poem called A Single Rose. His performance brought an audience to their feet and has garnered 35,000 views on YouTube. Now 24, Mustafa has written songs for the Weeknd, Camila Cabello, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber, and co-founded a hip hop collective called Halal Gang.

Lately, Mustafa has been reading the nonfiction book In the Wake by Christina Sharpe. Here's why he recommends it to others.

"We've lost so much. These last two years have been a continuous burial. Beyond the virus, the city of Toronto's murder rate has also soared. This here is a perfect reimagination of Black death and all that surrounds and follows it, that reimagination once felt impossible for me, Sharpe gives us enough space and light to question and reckon with our existence. She teaches us how each process, each burial, each life is politicized, policed and made invisible. Sharpe traces every wound back to every knife back to every bladesmith. I've been both protector and prey, both war and prayer: In the Wake helps answer each clash, it draws a thread through the multitudes of our grief. How Black life pays for its offering and for its pain and for its gift.

"People have not written enough, there are not as many accounts of our deaths as we may imagine, a lot of what we have is not wide enough, In the Wake is a reminder for me, that my documentation of grief on When Smoke Rises is vital to my community's lineage, that the assumption of remembrance is dangerous because systems of oppression are designed to make us forget. We must go to the ends of the earth to preserve each other. This book here is a guide, a deeply personal and intellectual exploration of Blackness, it gives us a complete look at how our beginning shapes our end."