In Conversation with Black Canadian Authors: Beyond the Single Story

Program Type:

Author Event, Black History Month, Culture of Reading, Inclusion and Belonging, Writing and Publishing

Age Group:

Adult, Young Adult, Seniors
Please note you are looking at an event that has already happened.
  • Registration is required for this event.
  • Registration is no longer available for this event.

Event Details

Black Canadian stories can’t be contained in a single narrative, and they were never meant to be.

Join us for an afternoon celebrating Black Canadian literature, its range, its rhythm, its truth-telling, and its imagination. Featuring Kern Carter, Terese Mason Pierre, and Zalika Reid-Benta, this panel invites readers into a book-centred conversation grounded in their work and the worlds they build on the page.

The event will open with brief readings, followed by a moderated discussion exploring voice, craft, place, and the questions these books are asking, about belonging, memory, love, lineage, and what it means to tell Black stories in Canada with complexity and care. The afternoon will close with an audience Q&A.

Moderated by Pickering Library’s own Lalaa Comrie, creator of This Black Girl Reads, a community that uplifts Black storytelling and reading as a practice of connection.

This is a space for readers who want to go deeper than the synopsis—into language, choices, and the power of story to hold a community.

 

Kern Carter

Kern Carter is a Toronto-based novelist known for emotionally sharp stories that explore family, friendship, and complicated relationships, often through a contemporary Black Canadian lens.
Books include: And Then There Was Us; Boys and Girls Screaming; Is There a Boy Like Me?

=> Check him out on Instagram @kerncarter


Terese Mason Pierre

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor whose work moves between the literary and speculative, with publications across Canadian and international outlets. She won the 2023 Writers’ Trust of Canada McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and is co-editor-in-chief of Augur Magazine.
Books include: Myth and (as editor) As the Earth Dreams.

=> Check her out on instagram @teresempierre 

 

Zalika Reid-Benta

Zalika Reid-Benta is a Canadian writer whose work draws on Jamaican diasporic life and folklore, blending realism with the mythic and the intimate. Her writing has received major recognition within Canadian literary circles.
Books include: Frying Plantain and River Mumma.

=> Check her out on Instagram @zalikarb