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Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them
By Shakil Choudhury. 2016
What if our interactions with those different from us are strongly influenced by things happening below the radar of awareness,…
hidden even from ourselves? Deep Diversity explores this question and argues that "us vs. them" is an unfortunate but normal part of the human experience due to reasons of both nature and nurture.To really work through issues of racial difference and foster greater levels of fairness and inclusion, argues Shakil Choudhury, requires an understanding of the human mind—its conscious and unconscious dimensions. Deep Diversity integrates Choudhury’s twenty years of experience with interviews with researchers in social neuroscience, implicit bias, psychology, and mindfulness. Using a compassionate but challenging approach, Choudhury helps readers identify their own bias and offers practical ways to break the "prejudice habits" we have all learned, in order to tackle systemic discrimination.Buffoon
By Anosh Irani. 2021
Three-time Governor General’s Literary Award–shortlisted author and playwright Anosh Irani’s critically acclaimed one-man show Buffoon is a masterclass of tragicomic theatre. Born…
to circus folk who prefer trapezing over parenting, Felix quickly learns to turn life’s misfortunes into jokes. His longing for family and home is piqued at the tender age of seven when he falls hopelessly in love with an older woman, the beguiling Aja, who is eight. In the process, a clown is born, and we watch him grow into a middle-aged buffoon. Over time, Felix stops waiting for someone else to love him; his journey becomes one of loving himself. A story of love, loss, and the fate that binds us, Buffoon is a gut-wrenching one-man show that expertly walks the tightrope between heartbreak and hilarity.My Ackee Tree: A Chef's Memoir of Finding Home in the Kitchen
By Suzanne Barr. 2022
For fans of The Measure of My Powers and Notes from a Young Black Chef, a memoir about food, family, and…
the recipes that brought one woman home when she needed it the most. Suzanne Barr&’s journey to become a chef started when she was 30. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she moved home to Florida to take care of her. Suzanne escorted her mother to doctor&’s appointments, bathed her, and kept her company, but the hardest part of the experience was that she didn&’t know how to cook for her. She didn&’t even know where to begin. Fast-forward to the summer of 2017 when Suzanne became the inaugural Chef-in-Residence at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. She wanted to create a menu that represented who she was as a chef and it emerged as a love letter to her mother. Her Rite of Passage Menu, as she called it, changed her. It started her on a journey that has brought her closer to her mother, to her ancestors, and to her Jamaican heritage. But a lot has happened before and since. My Ackee Tree tells the story of a woman who is always on the move, always seeking; who battles the stereotypes of being a Black female cook to become a culinary star in an industry beset by dated practices and landlords with too much power. From the ackee tree in front of her childhood home, through New York City, Atlanta, Hawaii, the Hamptons, and France, Suzanne takes us on her unpredictable journey, and at every turn, she finds light and comfort in the kitchen. Told in a voice as fresh and honest as her cooking, My Ackee Tree is a celebration of creativity, soul searching, and motherhood that asks, &“How can I keep the things I love?&”The Girl in the Middle: Growing Up Between Black and White, Rich and Poor
By Anais Granofsky. 2022
A moving and vivid memoir of a young girl—long before her starring role in the Degrassi series—who was always switching…
between worlds, wanting only to be lovedWhen Anais Granofsky’s parents meet in the early 1970s, they are foreign and fascinating to each other. Stanley is the son of a very wealthy Toronto Jewish family; Jean is one of fifteen children from a poor Black Methodist family, direct descendants of the freed Randolph slaves. When Jean becomes pregnant at nineteen, Stanley doesn’t anticipate being cut off by his parents. Nor does the couple anticipate that Stanley, soon to rename himself Fakeer, will find his calling in the spiritual teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on an ashram in India.The Girl in the Middle is the story of a child who spends her life navigating between two very different worlds. Alone, Anais and her mother teetered on the poverty line, sharing a mattress in a single room in social housing in Toronto, while her grandparents lived a twenty-minute car ride away on the mansion-lined Bridle Path. As Anais grows up, she spends weekends having lunch with her grandmother by the pool, while during the week, she and her mother often don’t know where their next meal will come from, even after Fakeer’s return. Anais realizes that if she wants to be loved, she has to switch identities to please each of the adult women in her family. It isn’t until she gets a role in the TV series Degrassi Junior High that Anais finds a third world—her own—and begins to define an identity for herself. The Girl in the Middle offers a powerful lens to explore how two families, one white and one Black, faced systemic oppression spanning multiple generations and came out at opposite economic classes—and how they clashed when they shared a granddaughter. With compassion and vivid storytelling, Granofsky shares her experience of living in opposite worlds, and demonstrates how generational shame, grief and prejudice ultimately lead to love and forgiveness.Peace Is a Practice: An Invitation to Breathe Deep and Find a New Rhythm for Life
By Morgan Harper Nichols. 2022
When you breathe in all the grace available to you and release everything that is outside of your control, you'll…
discover peace that surpasses your circumstances. All it takes is practice.If you feel overwhelmed with anxiety about the future, you're far from alone. For many of us, when we're not worrying about what is to come, we find ourselves wrestling with things from the past. Where does that leave us today?Morgan Harper Nichols has learned the answer to this question. She has examined stories from her own life and the lives of people around the world and noticed a common thread: we all long for peace. We're all seeking light and life. But these things don't happen passively. Peace Is a Practice invites you to become a peacemaker in your own life, starting right where you are, and in some of the most unexpected places. As these words and images inspire you to take daily steps toward peace, you'll uncover the key to:Embracing the beauty of the presentLetting go of regret of the past and fear of the futureDeveloping a path toward meaning and authenticityApproaching life's challenges with faith and a calm confidenceFeeling peace even in the midst of uncertainty or difficult times In every moment, there is something as deep and boundless as a winding river waiting to be found--a true peace that flows, beckoning you to rest . . . and be still.Wrong Side of the Court
By H. N. Khan. 2022
Fifteen-year-old Fawad has big dreams about being the world's first Pakistani to be drafted into the NBA. A first-generation Pakistani coming-of-age story…
for fans of David Yoon and Ben Philippe.Fifteen-year-old Fawad Chaudhry loves two things: basketball and his mother's potato and ground-beef stuffed parathas. Both are round and both help him forget about things like his father, who died two years ago, his mother&’s desire to arrange a marriage to his first cousin, Nusrat, back home in Pakistan, and the tiny apartment in Regent Park he shares with his mom and sister. Not to mention his estranged best friend Yousuf, who's coping with the shooting death of his older brother. But Fawad has plans: like, asking out Ashley, even though she lives on the other, wealthier side of the tracks, and saving his friend Arif from being beaten into a pulp for being the school flirt, and making the school basketball team and dreaming of being the world&’s first Pakistani to be drafted into the NBA. All he has to do now is convince his mother to let him try out for the basketball team. And let him date girls from his school. Not to mention somehow get Omar, the neighborhood bully, to leave him alone . .Our Violent Ends (These Violent Delights #2)
By Chloe Gong. 2016
Shanghai is under siege in this captivating and searingly romantic sequel to These Violent Delights, which New York Times bestselling…
author Natasha Ngan calls “deliciously dark.” The year is 1927, and Shanghai teeters on the edge of revolution. After sacrificing her relationship with Roma to protect him from the blood feud, Juliette has been a girl on a mission. One wrong move, and her cousin will step in to usurp her place as the Scarlet Gang’s heir. The only way to save the boy she loves from the wrath of the Scarlets is to have him want her dead for murdering his best friend in cold blood. If Juliette were actually guilty of the crime Roma believes she committed, his rejection might sting less. Roma is still reeling from Marshall’s death, and his cousin Benedikt will barely speak to him. Roma knows it’s his fault for letting the ruthless Juliette back into his life, and he’s determined to set things right—even if that means killing the girl he hates and loves with equal measure. Then a new monstrous danger emerges in the city, and though secrets keep them apart, Juliette must secure Roma’s cooperation if they are to end this threat once and for all. Shanghai is already at a boiling point: The Nationalists are marching in, whispers of civil war brew louder every day, and gangster rule faces complete annihilation. Roma and Juliette must put aside their differences to combat monsters and politics, but they aren’t prepared for the biggest threat of all: protecting their hearts from each other.