Join Curtis Carmichael, author, professional speaker, certified STEM elementary teacher and social entrepreneur, March 30th at 7pm ET for the launch of his book, Butterflies in the Trenches: The Hood, an Epic Bike Ride, and Finding Inspiration (Synergy Books). The event will take place at the Roof Garden in Toronto at Bloor and Dovercourt.
You must be registered for free ticket to attend. No walk ins. Your registration fee includes meet-and-greet, music performances, drinks, and light food refreshments. Books will be available for purchases from Synergy Books (Curtis Carmichael) and Another Story Book Shop.
Questions: info@curtiscarmichael.ca (Synergy Books)
Roof Garden Toronto
1 Roof Garden Lane
Join Pamela Mordecai on Monday, March 27th at 6:30pm for the launch of the de book of Joseph (Mawenzi House), at Massey College in the Junior Common Room. Pamela will be joined by Ronald Cummings, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and will also be doing a reading and Q&A. Books will be available for purchase on site courtesy of Queen Books.
de book of Joseph the third book in Mordecai’s epic trilogy about the lives of Jesus, his mother, Mary, and his foster father, the tekton of Nazareth.
The event will run from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.Coffee, tea, wine, and cheese will be available. Book your spot by emailing events@mawenzihouse.com.
Massey College Junior Common Room 4 Devonshire Pl, Toronto
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Margaret DeRosia on Wednesday, March 15th at 7pm ET to celebrate the launch of Eight Strings (Simon and Schuster Canada) at Glad Day Bookshop. Margaret will be reading from her enthralling debut novel, and will be available for a Q&A and book signing.
The event doors will open at 7pm, but the bookshop will be open beforehand if you’d like to browse. During the event, the Glad Day café will be open for food and drinks, plus some other celebratory treats will be served.
Copies of Eight Strings will be available for sale courtesy of Glad Day.
Glad Day Bookshop
499 Church St, Toronto
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join author and tattoo artist Chris MacDonald on Friday, October 21 at 7:00pm ET at the Dakota Tavern at 249 Ossington Ave, Toronto, for the launch The Things I Came Here With: A Memoir (ECW Press, 2022).
The launch will feature performances by Hamilton Trading Co. and LeBarons.
This remarkable memoir examines what tattooing means to MacDonald and traces the connection his artistic motives have to both his family and childhood. The Things I Came Here With is about how crucial our past is to understanding our future, but it’s also a love letter to his daughter about the importance of expression, life’s uncertainty, and beauty. Books provided by Type Books.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Diane Borsato on Thursday, October 13 from 6pm ET at Type Books in the Junction (2887 Dundas Street West) for the launch of her book Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt – An Illustrated Guide to the Fascinating, the Delicious, the Deadly and the Strange (D&M), illustrated by Kelsey Oseid. There will be a reception with refreshments, door prizes and other fun(gus).
Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt is a beautifully produced volume—filled with insights, anecdotes and details about more than 120 common and charismatic fungi from across the northern hemisphere. This book offers a new perspective on the fascinating, edible, deadly and strange world of fungi, from candy caps to earth stars, puff balls to poison pie, prized chanterelles, morels, hedgehogs and the bloodless destroying angel. It includes mushrooms named after fairies and demons, little brown mushrooms that are wildly hallucinogenic and phallic specimens prized as aphrodisiacs. There and mushrooms that are the colour of precious jewels and others that glow in the dark—and even mushrooms that look so much like woodland birds they are shot at by hunters. Here is a book that celebrates how mushrooming can radically expand our perspectives, connect us to nature and quietly enrich our lives.
Diane Borsato is an artist, naturalist and educator. She is an associate professor of Experimental Studio at the University of Guelph. She has exhibited her work involving mushrooms, bees, raptors, orchards and tea in galleries and museums around the world and was the co-editor and a contributor to the book Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art (D&M, 2021). She lives in Toronto, ON. For more about Borsato, please visit her website.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Elaine Kachala on Thursday, November 10 at 6pm ET for the hybrid launch of her book Superpower? The Wearable-Tech Revolution (Orca Books, October 2022)! This free in-person event will be an open-house from 6pm ET to 8pm ET at MakerKids Leaside (1661 Bayview Ave, East York, ON) with STEM activities, prizes and snacks, while a presentation will be streamed live via YouTube from 6:30pm to 7pm ET.
The event will be hosted by the author and Aimee Savard with presentations about the book, MakerKids and the importance of STEM/STEAM learning. There will also be giveaways of books, coupons towards MakerKid’s programs, gift cards for Mabel’s Fables Bookstore. Books will be for sale on site, courtesy of Mabel’s Fables.
Super strength, super hearing, super vision and super connection. The wearable technologies that could make these things possible are mixing into our lives faster than we realize. The stakes are high. In Superpower?: The Wearable-Tech Revolution, young readers will discover how technological innovation can help people survive and thrive.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Tanya Turton on September 15 at 5:30pm ET to celebrate the release of Jade Is a Twisted Green (Dundurn Press)! The debut author will be in conversation with Pascale Diverlus, followed by a Q&A and book signing, at A Different Booklist (779 Bathurst St, Toronto).
Appetizers will be provided at this free Toronto Lit Up event.
Jade Is a Twisted Green is a coming-of-age story about queer Black identity, love, passion, chosen family and rediscovering life’s pleasures after loss. Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister. Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life’s most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present. On the journey to turning twenty-five, she finally sees that she belongs to herself, and goes about the business of reclaiming that self. Through a series of whirlwind love affairs, parties, and trips abroad, Jade stumbles toward relinquishing the weight of her trauma as she fully comes into her own as a young Black woman and writer. Get your copy from A Different Booklist here.
Moderator:
Pascale Diverlus is born of a lineage of Haitian freedom fighters. She is an award-winning community organizer, storyteller, communications specialist, digital strategist and educator. Pascale’s practice is rooted in reimagining, redefining and rebuilding a different, better world— liberation through all methods. As an educator, she supports organizations, agencies and businesses to develop and adopt organizational transformation rooted in anti-oppressive frameworks. This includes unpacking and unearthing anti-Black racism, misogynoir, cissexism and other systems of oppression within the workplace and society. She creates equity-based assessments, conducts internal reviews, and assists in the implementation of practices, policies and protocols centred on equity and human rights practices. She is a freelance writer whose words have been featured in the Toronto Star, Flare Magazine and Chatelaine Magazine amongst others. With pen and mic, she is instrumental to today’s social movements for marginalized people to attain joy, love, revolution and freedom.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Didier Leclair on August 11 at 6pm to celebrate the release of the English edition of his book Toronto, I Love You (Mawenzi House), translated by Elaine Kennedy! The author and translator will be joined in conversation by the writer Paul Savoie.
The free Toronto Lit Up book launch will take place at the Debates Room (#2034) in the University of Toronto’s historic Hart House building. Books will be for sale on site, courtesy of Another Story Bookshop. Light refreshments and drinks will be provided by in-house catering services.
In Toronto, I Love You, Raymond Dossougbé flees the misery of his home town in Benin, arrives in Toronto, and is immediately charmed by the city. He sees it as a place of freedom and light, a sanctuary where he, like so many others, can begin anew. But as he becomes familiar with the city and its inhabitants, he realizes that his Afro-Caribbean roommates look like him but aren’t his brothers. He discovers a free community that is mentally shackled, an underground network that is stuck in the past, immigrants who are unable to adapt. He sees deep poverty, extreme wealth, and the consequences of police brutality. Eventually he finds his bearings in this new world and comes to a better understanding of himself and the colourful characters around him.
The French edition of Toronto, I Love You won the Prix Trillium when it first came out in 2000.
Special guests:
Elaine Kennedy has enjoyed a lengthy and diversified career as a professional translator and editor. A native of Toronto, she studied English literature, French language and translation in North America and Europe. She has worked as a translator in the academic and cultural sectors. The co-winner of the 3Macs carte blanche Prize and a finalist for the Toronto Book Award and the International Book Award, she presently devotes her full time to literary translation.
Paul Savoie is one of Canada’s most prolific bilingual writers. Originally from Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, he has lived in Ontario since the early 1970s. He has written more than 30 books, including several collections of poetry, stories, and translations. His poetry books won the Trillium Book Award twice. Involved in the arts community for more than 25 years, Savoie also composes music for piano.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Emily Saso on Thursday, September 8 at 6pm ET at Tranzac Club to celebrate the launch of Nine Dash Line (Freehand Books, September 2022)!
The free Toronto Lit Up event will feature an interview with the author from Becky Toyne. Snacks are free, and drinks will be served by the Tranzac Club. Please review the venue’s COVID policy here. Masks are required except between bites of food and drinks of drinks!
Nine Dash Line is a thrilling novel about two people stranded under mysterious circumstances in the South China Sea, battling the memories of the crimes that haunt them. Books will be for sale on site, courtesy of Ben McNally Books.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Sophie Jai on July 14 at 7pm ET at Famous Last Words to celebrate the launch of WILD FIRES (HarperCollins Canada, August 2022)!
The free Toronto Lit Up event will feature Sophie Jai in conversation with Tiara Chutkhan, an audience Q&A, a book signing and a custom WILD FIRES cocktail for everyone to enjoy!
Moving between Toronto and Trinidad, Wild Fires is a vivid and compelling story exploring the ways we mourn and why we avoid the very things that can save us. When a call from one of her sisters brings Cassandra news of their cousin’s death, she has to return home for the funeral. To Toronto and the big house on Florence Street, where her sisters are hiding more than themselves in their rooms, where the tension brewing between her mother and aunts has been decades in the making, and where sooner or later every secret, unspoken word and painful memory will find its way out into the open. Get your copy here.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
