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We have always been here: a queer Muslim memoir /
By Samra Habib. 2019
Growing up in Pakistan, Samra Habib lacks a blueprint for the life she wants. She has a mother who gave…
up everything to be a pious, dutiful wife and an overprotective father who seems to conspire against a life of any adventure. Plus, she has to hide the fact that she's Ahmadi to avoid persecution from religious extremists. As the threats against her family increase, they seek refuge in Canada, where new financial and cultural obstacles await them. When Samra discovers that her mother has arranged her marriage, she must again hide a part of herself--the fun-loving, feminist teenager that has begun to bloom--until she simply can't any longer. So begins a journey of self-discovery that takes her to Tokyo, where she comes to terms with her sexuality, and to a queer-friendly mosque in Toronto, where she returns to her faith in the same neighbourhood where she attended her first drag show. Along the way, she learns that the facets of her identity aren't as incompatible as she was led to believe, and that her people had always been there--the world just wasn't ready for them yet. 2019.Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada
By Syrus Marcus Ware, Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson. 2020
The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white assailant inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, which quickly spread…
outside the borders of the United States. The movement’s message found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before them. Until We Are Free contains some of the very best writing on the hottest issues facing the Black community in Canada. It describes the latest developments in Canadian Black activism, organizing efforts through the use of social media, Black-Indigenous alliances, and more."Until We Are Free busts myths of Canadian politeness and niceness, myths that prevent Canadians from properly fulfilling its dream of multiculturalism and from challenging systemic racism, including the everyday assaults on black and brown bodies. This book needs to be read and put into practice by everyone." —Vershawn Young, author of Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity and co-author of Other People's English: Code Meshing, Code Switching, and African American Literacy Contributors: Silvia Argentina Arauz - Toronto, ON Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - Toronto, ON Patrisse Cullors - Los Angeles, CA Giselle Dias - Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON OmiSoore Dryden - Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS Paige Galette - Whitehorse, YK Dana Inkster - University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB Sarah Jama - Hamilton, ON El Jones - Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, NS Anique Jordan - Toronto, ON Dr. Naila Keleta Mae - University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON Janaya Khan - Los Angeles, CA Gilary Massa - York University, Toronto, ON Robyn Maynard - University of Toronto, Toronto, ON QueenTite Opaleke - Toronto, ON Randolph Riley - Halifax, NS Camille Turner - York University, Toronto, ON Ravyn Wngz - Toronto, ONDead Mom Walking: A Memoir of Miracle Cures and Other Disasters
By Rachel Matlow. 2020
"A hilarious memoir of effervescent misadventures." --Toronto Star"How am I laughing at someone's mother's cancer? How? We think we can't…
laugh about death, about cancer, about our mothers and their suffering . . . and we can't, but we can. And there's so much relief in that. I laughed, I cried, I laughed and laughed and laughed." --Carolyn Taylor, BARONESS VON SKETCH SHOWA traumedy about life and death (and every cosmic joke in between)When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Rachel Matlow is concerned but hopeful. It's Stage 1, so her mom will get surgery and everything will go back to normal. But growing up in Rachel's family, there was no normal. Elaine, an alternative school teacher and self-help junkie, was never a capital M "Mommy"--she spent more time meditating than packing lunches--and Rachel, who played hockey with the boys and refused to ever wear a dress, was no ordinary daughter.When Elaine decides to forgo conventional treatment and heal herself naturally, Rachel is forced to ponder whether the very things that made her mom so special--her independent spirit, her belief in being the author of her own story--are what will ultimately kill her. As the cancer progresses, so does Elaine's conviction in doing things her way. She assembles a dream team of alternative healers, gulps down herbal tinctures with every meal, and talks (with respect) to her cancer cells. Anxious and confused, Rachel is torn between indulging her pie-in-the-sky pursuits (ayahuasca and all) and pleading with the person who's taking her mother away.With irreverence and honesty--and a little help from Elaine's journals and self-published dating guide, plus hours of conversations recorded in her dying days--Matlow brings her inimitable mother to life on the page. Dead Mom Walking is the hilarious and heartfelt story of what happens when two people who've always written their own script go head to head with each other, and with life's least forgiving plot device.What the Eagle Sees: Indigenous Stories of Rebellion and Renewal
By Eldon Yellowhorn, Kathy Lowinger. 2019
"There is no death. Only a change of worlds.” —Chief Seattle [Seatlh], Suquamish Chief What do people do when their…
civilization is invaded? Indigenous people have been faced with disease, war, broken promises, and forced assimilation. Despite crushing losses and insurmountable challenges, they formed new nations from the remnants of old ones, they adopted new ideas and built on them, they fought back, and they kept their cultures alive. When the only possible “victory” was survival, they survived. In this brilliant follow up to Turtle Island, esteemed academic Eldon Yellowhorn and award-winning author Kathy Lowinger team up again, this time to tell the stories of what Indigenous people did when invaders arrived on their homelands. What the Eagle Sees shares accounts of the people, places, and events that have mattered in Indigenous history from a vastly under-represented perspective—an Indigenous viewpoint.A revelatory book about gender, mental illness, parenting, mortality, bike mechanics, work, class, and the task of living in a…
body. Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel). In "Tomboy," andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; "37 Jobs 21 Houses" interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is "Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive," sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small Canadian communities. With the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote's Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one's place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders what it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world. With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.Take Back The Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age
By Nora Loreto. 2020
Two decades of neoliberalism have destroyed a structured, pan-regional feminist movement in Canada. As a result, new generations of feminists…
have come to age without ever seeing the force that an organized social movement can have in democratic society. They have never benefited from the knowledge, the debates, the actions, the mass mobilizations or the leadership that all accompany a social movement and instead organize in decentralized silos. As a result, government and corporate leaders have co-opted feminism to turn it into something that can be bought, sold, or used to attract voters. Campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #MeToo, the SlutWalks and the Canadian Women’s marches, while important, don’t yet have the organized power to bring the changes that activists seek to make in society. In Take Back The Fight, Nora Loreto examines the state of modern feminism in Canada and argues that feminists must organize to take back feminism from politicians, business leaders and journalists who distort and obscure its power. Furthermore, Loreto urges today’s activists to overcome the challenges that sank the movement decades ago, to stop centering whiteness as the quintessential woman’s experience, and to find ways to rebuild the communities that have been obliterated by neoliberal economic policies.North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians,…
who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era.By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism.Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.A History of My Brief Body
By Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2020
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHYFINALIST FOR THE BC AND YUKON BOOK PRIZE, FOR BOTH THE…
HUBERT EVANS NON-FICTION PRIZE AND JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKESNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (Untold Lives)
By Marcello Di Cintio. 2021
In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the…
borderland of the North American taxi. “The taxi,” writes Marcello Di Cintio, “is a border.” Occupying the space between public and private, a cab brings together people who might otherwise never have met—yet most of us sit in the back and stare at our phones. Nowhere else do people occupy such intimate quarters and share so little. In a series of interviews with drivers, their backgrounds ranging from the Iraqi National Guard, to the Westboro Baptist Church, to an arranged marriage that left one woman stranded in a foreign country with nothing but a suitcase, Driven seeks out those missed conversations, revealing the unknown stories that surround us. Travelling across borders of all kinds, from battlefields and occupied lands to midnight fares and Tim Hortons parking lots, Di Cintio chronicles the many journeys each driver made merely for the privilege to turn on their rooflight. Yet these lives aren’t defined by tragedy or frustration but by ingenuity and generosity, hope and indomitable hard work. From night school and sixteen-hour shifts to schemes for athletic careers and the secret Shakespeare of Dylan’s lyrics, Di Cintio’s subjects share the passions and triumphs that drive them. Like the people encountered in its pages, Driven is an unexpected delight, and that most wondrous of all things: a book that will change the way you see the world around you. A paean to the power of personality and perseverance, it’s a compassionate and joyful tribute to the men and women who take us where we want to go.A Gay Man's Guide to Life: Get Real, Stand Tall, and Take Your Place
By Britt East. 2020
Many gay men find ourselves trapped in a series of no-win situations. If we don't live honestly and openly, we…
won't have the skills, wisdom, or relationships necessary to manifest our dreams. But when we do come out, we must confront the full force of societal homophobia, and consider a variety of questions: Can we create family without mimicking the norms of straight society? How do we cultivate sustainable gay friendships amidst our internalized homophobia? In a world of hook-up apps and disposable relationships, how do we find lasting love? A Gay Man's Guide to Life answers these questions. Britt East presents an approachable, no-nonsense path for gay men, to set down the excuses and get to the business of improving their lives. No new-age mumbo jumbo or wishy washy self-help jargon. Just real work focused on real results to unleash our true selves and unlock our best lives.Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
By Ivan Coyote. 2021
Beloved storyteller Ivan Coyote returns with their most intimate and moving book yet. Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent…
decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered. Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work—compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and Trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. 2022
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority…
of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada
By Michelle Good. 2023
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERA bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.With authority and insight,…
Truth Telling examines a wide range of Indigenous issues framed by Michelle Good’s personal experience and knowledge.From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening. Truth Telling also demonstrates the myths underlying Canadian history and the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin modern social institutions in Canada.Passionate and uncompromising, Michelle Good affirms that meaningful and substantive reconciliation hinges on recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the return of lands, and a just redistribution of the wealth that has been taken from those lands without regard for Indigenous peoples.Truth Telling is essential reading for those looking to acknowledge the past and understand the way forward.Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss
By Betsy Warland. 2021
In Bloodroot, Betsy Warland traces how a mother and daughter's shared gender can shape the very anatomy of narrative itself.…
In her mother's final year,Warland quietly discovered how to disentangle a crucial, concealed story that had rendered their relationship disconnected and fraught. Warland weaves a common ground that moves beyond duty and despair, providing both questions and guideposts for readers, particularly those faced with ageing and ill parents and their loss.The 2000 edition of Bloodroot broke new ground in memoir form and uncharted storytelling. The 2021 edition, reprinted by Inanna for the launch of its InannaSignature Feminist Publications series, includes a new foreword by Susan Olding and a new essay by Warland that explores subsequent questions, insights and tenderness only the passage of time can enable.Reckoner rises: Volume 1, Breakdown (The reckoner Rises Ser. #1)
By David Robertson. 2020
Acclaimed writer, David A. Robertson, delivers suspense, adventure, and humour in this stunningly illustrated graphic novel continuation of The Reckoner…
trilogy. Cole and Eva arrive in Winnipeg intent on destroying Mihko Laboratories. Their plans change when a new threat surfaces, and Cole has terrifying visions. Are these just troubled dreams or are they leading him to a terrifying truth? Will Eva be able to harness her powers to continue the investigation without him?The Reckoner rises: Volume 2, Version control
By David Robertson. 2022
"With Cole barely clinging to life, Eva fearlessly takes the lead to investigate Mihko's horrific experiments. But where's Brady? After…
learning that Mihko reinstated the Reckoner Initiative, Cole and Eva confront Mihko head-on. But a vicious battle with Mihko's newest test subject leaves Cole close to death, and Eva must continue their investigation without him. With Brady missing and Cole in recovery, Eva is on her own. When Eva stumbles across Mihko's secret laboratory, she finds her worst nightmares come to life. What new terrors has Mihko created? And can Eva find Brady before it's too late?"--Back coverVanished Years
By Rupert Everett. 2012
'[An] instant classic' IndependentRupert Everett's first memoir - Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins - was an international bestseller and…
an instant classic on publication in 2006. Reviewers compared him to Evelyn Waugh, David Niven, Noel Coward and Lord Byron. But Rupert Everett is - of course - one of a kind.Mischievous, touching and nothing less than brilliant, this new memoir is filled with stories, from childhood to the present. Astonishing encounters; tragedy and comedy; vivid portraits of friends and rivals; razor-sharp observations of the celebrity circus from LA to London and beyond... there is something extraordinary on every page. A pilgrimage to Lourdes with his father is both hilarious and moving. A misguided step into reality TV goes horribly wrong. From New York to Moscow to Berlin to Phnom Penh, Vanished Years takes the reader on a wild and wonderful new journey with a charming (and rather disreputable) companion.Unequal Crime Decline: Theorizing Race, Urban Inequality, and Criminal Violence
By Karen F. Parker. 2008
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleCrime in most urban areas has been falling since 1991. While the decline has been well-documented,…
few scholars have analyzed which groups have most benefited from the crime decline and which are still on the frontlines of violence--and why that might be. In Unequal Crime Decline, Karen F. Parker presents a structural and theoretical analysis of the various factors that affect the crime decline, looking particularly at the past three decades and the shifts that have taken place, and offers original insight into which trends have declined and why.Taking into account such indicators as employment, labor market opportunities, skill levels, housing, changes in racial composition, family structure, and drug trafficking, Parker provides statistics that illustrate how these factors do or do not affect urban violence, and carefully considers these factors in relation to various crime trends, such as rates involving blacks, whites, but also trends among black males, white females, as well as others. Throughout the book she discusses popular structural theories of crime and their limitations, in the end concentrating on today's issues and important contemporary policy to be considered. Unequal Crime Decline is a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated look at the relationship among race, urban inequality, and violence in the years leading up to and following America's landmark crime drop.