Zalika Reid-Benta is the author of Frying Plantain, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Frying Plantain was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, the Toronto Book Award, the White Pine Award and the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award. Zalika served on many juries including the Giller, the Danuta Gleed, the Amazon First Novel Prize and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. She received an M.F.A. from Columbia University, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was the 2021-22 Writer in Residence at Western University. Zalika’s second book, River Mumma, a magical realist novel inspired by Jamaican folklore, was released by Penguin Canada August 22^nd 2023.