The East End Acts Book Club
January – December 2025
Last Tuesday of Every Month
St. Matthew’s Clubhouse, 450 Broadview Ave.
Free | Sign Up Below
Accessibility: Please Contact Us If You Have Any Needs or Concerns Regarding Access!

About the East End Acts Book Club

The East End Acts Book Club began in the spring of 2024 as a place for folks to co-create a community centered around reading towards resistance in the East End. Now for 2025, East End Arts is coming on board to support this program by presenting the club on the last Tuesday of every month at St. Matthew’s Clubhouse. The EEA Book Club follows a “Reading Towards Resistance” theme. It is an anti-colonial book club dedicated to building community through collective reading and critical conversation. Rooted in the belief that stories shape our understanding of the world, we gather to explore complex ideas, challenge oppressive narratives, and imagine liberated futures. Together, we create a reflective space for learning, questioning, and envisioning collective liberation.

For the 2025 Season, it is divided into three themed sections:

Jan-April: Black Thought and Pan-African Resistance
May-August: On Labour and Interconnected Movements
September-December: Indigenous Resurgence and Land Back

Led by local members of East End Acts, people from all walks of life are invited to join this monthly club. Scroll down to learn about the 2025 lineup of books (more to come as the books are confirmed!)

2025 Book Lineup

Over the course of the next several months, we will read the following incredible books, selected by the lead facilitator, Claudia:

Tuesday January 28th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
BOOK: Ghost Season, by Fatin Abbas
Book Description: A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, a northern nomad with whom he’s fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern aid worker Alex finds his plans thwarted by a changing climate and looming civil war. Dancing between the adults is Mustafa, a clever, endearing twelve-year-old, whose schemes to rise out of poverty set off cataclysmic events on the compound.Amid the paradoxes of identity, art, humanitarian aid, and a territory riven by conflict, William, Layla, Dena, Alex, and Mustafa must forge bonds stronger than blood or identity. Weaving a sweeping history of the breakup of Sudan into the lives of these captivating characters, Fatin Abbas explores the porous and perilous nature of borders—whether they be national, ethnic, or religious—and the profound consequences for those who cross them. Ghost Season is a gripping, vivid debut that announces Abbas as a powerful new voice in fiction.
Tuesday February 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
BOOK: How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, by La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Book Description: Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls “mad methodology.” Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.
Tuesday March 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
BOOK: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
Book Description: The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom. Pecola’s life does change—in painful, devastating ways.With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison’s most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.
Tuesday April 29, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
BOOK: Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur
Book Description:On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.

2025 Book Club Dates (with Book Choices Coming Soon):

Tuesday, May 27th, 6:30-8:30PM
Tuesday, June 24th, 6:30-8:30PM
Tuesday, July 29th, 6:30-8:30PM
Tuesday, August 26th, 6:30-8:30PM
SEPTEMBER TBD (to accommodate for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation), 6:30-8:30PM
Tuesday, October 28th, 6:30-8:30PM
Tuesday, November 25th, 6:30-8:30PM
DECEMBER TBD (to accommodate for Winter Holidays), 6:30-8:30PM

Sign up Here!

Interested in joining the East End Acts Book Club, supported by East End Arts? Click the button below!

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Support Local Bookstores

Joining us for the EEA Book Club? You can borrow these books from the Toronto Library, or if you’re interested in purchasing copies of them, consider supporting one of our many amazing east end book stores!

Accessibility

All meetings as part of the EEA Book Club will take place in-person at St. Matthew’s Clubhouse, a fully-accessible venue with accessible washrooms. If you have specific accessibility requirements to participate in this program, we encourage you to reach out to Program Manager at East End Arts, Mahmoud Ismail, mahmoud@eastendarts.ca

Health & Safety

Participant & staff safety are of utmost importance to East End Arts and East End Acts, and will be a priority during this program! Please note the following:

If you are feeling unwell, we ask that you please postpone or cancel your visit to our Clubhouse.
Masks are not mandatory inside our Clubhouse, however we continue to operate a mask-friendly space, and we will have disposable masks available for those who would like to wear one.
We continue to ask all of our participants and visitors to practice good hand hygiene practices.
Enhanced cleaning routines remain in place in our Clubhouse.
Hand sanitizer will be available on site at all times.

About East End Acts

Community members from the Toronto-Danforth & Beaches-East York neighborhoods mobilizing to create political and social change. Learn more about them on their Instagram account @eastendacts