East End Acts Book Club, 2025

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Tuesday, May 27th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: I Hope We Choose Love, by Kai Cheng Thom
    Book Description:     What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse. 
  6. Tuesday, June 24th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
    Book Description: When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. Here Henríquez seamlessly interweaves the story of these star-crossed lovers, and of the Rivera and Toro families, with the testimonials of men and women who have come to the United States from all over Latin America.
  7. Tuesday, July 29th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:  Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, by Chanelle Grant and Elene Lam
    Book Description:     In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.
  8. Tuesday, August 26th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:     Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
    Book Description:     In the refugee camp of Jenin, Amal is born into a world of loss—of home, country, and heritage. Her Palestinian family was driven from their ancestral village by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948. As the villagers fled that day, Amal’s older brother, just a baby, was stolen away by an Israeli soldier. In Jenin, the adults subsist on memories, waiting to return to the homes they love. Amal’s mother has walled away her heart with grief, and her father labors all day. But in the fleeting peacefulness of dawn, he reads to his young daughter daily, and she can feel his love for her, “as big as the ocean and all its fishes.” On those quiet mornings, they dream together of a brighter future.This is Amal’s story, the story of one family’s struggle and survival through over sixty years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, carrying us from Jenin to Jerusalem, to Lebanon and the anonymity of America. It is a story shaped by scars and fear, but also by the transformative intimacy of marriage and the fierce protectiveness of motherhood. It is a story of faith, forgiveness, and life-sustaining love.
  9. Monday,September 29th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK:     Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine by Stephen Salaita
    Book Description: The age of transnational humanities has arrived.” According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian Studies and American Indian Studies have more in common than one may think. In Inter/Nationalism, Salaita argues that American Indian and Indigenous studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism focusing on Palestine.Salaita offers a fascinating inside account of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which, among other things, aims to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. In doing so, he emphasizes BDS’s significant potential as an organizing community as well as its importance in the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and other colonized peoples such as Palestinians into conversation. His discussion includes readings of a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of U.S. President Andrew Jackson and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the U.S. and Israel.  Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine
  10. Tuesday,October 28th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nanquimo
    Book Description: From a fearless, internationally acclaimed activist, We Will Be Jaguars is an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest and protect her people.Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest and didn’t walk on pavement, or see a car, until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened. Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She spearheaded an alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest.
  11. Tuesday,November 25th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza
    Book Description: In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is hospitalized for an eating disorder. This brush with death becomes a rupture which brings both her personal and ancestral past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a cup of apricot yogurt stirs the taste of Sarah’s childhood, summoning the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother. In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Sarah unearths family secrets that force her to confront the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival, and love. 
    As silences break, heartbreak opens onto possibility. Sarah begins to grasp the ways her legacies echo and inform one another—through tragedy, and through love. She begins to resist the forces of assimilation, denial, and patriarchy, learning to assert herself in new ways that honor both her ancestors and herself. Weaving timelines, languages, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “history.” This stunning debut memoir ends in a cri de coeur for a world in which every body has a right to contain multitudes.
  12. Tuesday,December 30th, 6:30-8:30PM
    BOOK: Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America by Raúl Zibechi with George Ygarza Quispe (trans.)
    Book Description: Constructing Worlds Otherwise sets itself against the recolonization of Latin America by one-dimensional, ethnocentric perspectives that permeate the North American left and block fundamental social change in the Global South. In a provocative mix of polemic and on-the-ground analysis, Raúl Zibechi argues that it is time for radicals in the Global North to learn from the people their governments have colonized and oppressed for centuries. Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and shantytowns—he introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle. For Zibechi, real change comes from “societies in movement,” the people already fighting for their survival using egalitarian and traditional models of world-building, without the state, without official representatives, and without vanguards of political experts. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, with Zibechi placing his work in conversation with the ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, Abdullah Öcalan, for a rich and dynamic survey of global movements of decolonization. Now more urgent than ever, this translation by George Ygarza Quispe comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in a time of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.

2025 Book Club Dates:

  • Tuesday January 28th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday February 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday March 25th, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday April 29, 2025, 6:30-8:30PM
  • 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
  • *Monday, September 29th, 6:30-8:30PM (not on a Tuesday this month, to accomodate for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation)
  • Tuesday, October 28th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, November 25th, 6:30-8:30PM
  • Tuesday, December 30th, 6:30-8:30PM

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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 Producer at East End Arts, Merryn Connelly-Miller, merryn@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

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