CANCELLED – Book Club Gala with Lawrence Hill
We are sorry to announce that we have to cancel the May 6th Book Club Gala with celebrated author Lawrence Hill. COVID issues are preventing us from doing justice to the event.
We will plan another Book Club Gala for later in the year.
Find Lawrence Hill’s most recent book Beatrice and Croc Harry here.
MASSEY MEMBERS: Please login using your registered Massey email to receive applicable discounts and offers.
Speakers
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Niyosha KeyzadAlum, Massey CollegeNiyosha Keyzad is a PhD Candidate at the Department of English and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her research focuses on representations of Iran in post-revolution women’s life writing in the diaspora. Beyond her academic work and teaching, Niyosha is also an advocate for structural change in under-served communities across the city, particularly in response to the disparities afflicting Scarborough. She is co-founder of the Scarborough Studies Collective – a grass roots initiative dedicated to addressing systemic injustice in Scarborough through local knowledge and leadership.
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Lawrence HillAuthor; Senior Fellow, Massey College
LAWRENCE HILL is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes, which was made into a six-part TV mini-series, and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, also became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life (the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures), and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. On January 11, 2022, HarperCollins Canada will publish Hill’s eleventh book — the novel Beatrice and Croc Harry.
Hill’s volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, he has spent more than a decade volunteering in book clubs in federal penitentiaries. Through Walls to Bridges, he taught a third-year undergraduate memoir writing course to women incarcerated in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener ON.
Currently, Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, as well as a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who travelled from military bases in the Deep South to help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and (for screenwriting) a co-winner of the NAACP Award and a Canadian Screen Award. He lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton ON and in Woody Point, NL.
