Here’s what we have our eyes on!

Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All

With Sandy Hudson, hosted by Erika Shaker

Saturday, May 3 – 5:30PM

Join Sandy Hudson, multidisciplinary creator, writer and activist, and the founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, for a fiercely argued case for defunding the police.

In  Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All , she elucidates what defunding the police actually means and why it matters, by exploring today’s criminal landscape and the patterns and structures that result in safer, well-resourced communities. 

Hudson explores the origins of commonly held ideas about police and safety to show how police-related social policies are based more on a sensationalized idea of safety than on outcomes and data. She examines the destructive effects of policing on scores of people, arguing that investment in community resources and infrastructure rather than law enforcement is the key to making us safer.

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Inheritance

With Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and Iryn Tushabe, hosted by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Saturday, May 3 – 7:00PM

Join us for a taste of two of the year’s most acclaimed debut Canadian novels, celebrated stories set in Uganda, and a conversation on the ways we are shaped by–and in opposition to–our histories and cultures.

We, the Kindling is the acclaimed debut from Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-winner Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and is centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army in the 1990s. Those who survive bear the physical and psychological weight of these experiences—often within communities that wish only to forget or ignore them.

Everything Is Fine Here , the debut from Journey Prize-winner Iryn Tushabe is a coming of age story set in Uganda.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

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Everything Everywhere

With Emily Austin, Matthew James Jones and Georgia Toews, hosted by David Currie

Sunday, May 4 – 8:30PM

Learning to cope and thrive in a world seemingly hell-bent on disorienting, distracting and destabilizing us, provides the momentum behind three very different novels whose authors join us to talk fiction, resilience and the many ways we struggle to find ourselves.

We Could Be Rats,  the latest from Emily Austin, the bestselling local author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is the story of two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination. Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal. She did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures  from poet, novelist, and veteran Matthew James Jones, is the story of a drone operator stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan. As he monitors Sahar, a teenager and suspected terrorist, Jones commits the ultimate crime: he cares. In Kandahar, there’s a monster in every window. And there’s also one in every mirror.

Nobody Asked for This by Georgia Toews is a razor-sharp dramedy following a twenty-something comic as she navigates family grief, dysfunctional friendship, and a date gone very wrong. In between working the rounds of Toronto’s small comedy club circuit and auditioning for paper towel commercials, Virginia is tiptoeing around her depressed roommate and childhood friend, Haley, and having biweekly dinners with her bereaved stepdad, Dale, while trying to manage her own grief at the loss of her mother.

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