Tranzac Club
Award season kicking off with four award-winning authors // angels + guest-hosted by Friend of Pivot (and friend to all!!! ), the indomitable Khashayar Mohammadi. Get ready to laugh and cry!
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, lasagna lover and wicked witch based in Toronto, unceded Indigenous territory. She is the author of several award-winning works, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (recently selected for Emma Watson's book club) poetry collection a place called No Homeland, the children's book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, and the forthcoming essay collection I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes From the End of the World. Kai Cheng is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LBGT Writers and a two-time Lambda Literary Finalist. She has been published widely in print and online, and has performed in venues across the country.
Susan Glickman is a lapsed academic who teaches creative writing and works as a freelance editor, primarily of academic books. Yes, she loves punctuation. For the last three years she has also been a full-time art student at Central Technical School in Toronto, which gave her the confidence she needed to illustrate her last novel, The Discovery of Flight. Her hobbies are gardening, walking the dog, and making soup.
Fawn Parker is an MA candidate in the field of creative writing at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Set-Point (ARP Books, 2019) and a poetry collection forthcoming from Palimpsest Press. She is co-founder of BAD NUDES Magazine and BAD BOOKS Press. Fawn is the recipient of the Irving Layton Award in Fiction, the Avie Bennett Emerging Writers Award and the Adam Penn Gilders Scholarship in Creative Writing.
Zalika Reid-Benta is a born and bred Toronto writer, TV fanatic and cheeseburger enthusiast. In 2011 George Elliott Clarke recommended her as a “Writer to Watch”. Her work has appeared on the CBC website, in the TOK 7 anthology and in Apogee Journal. She is an alum of the 2017 Banff Writer’s Studio and received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University in 2014. Her work explores matters of intergenerational cycles, race, identity and culture through the lens of second-generation Caribbean Canadians. Her collection of linked short stories, Frying Plantain, is currently on offer and she is working on a fantasy YA novel.
Meet us in the Tiki Room of the Tranzac Club (an inclusive & accessible venue!). Doors at 8, words at ~8:30. Pivot is generously funded by the Toronto Arts Council and Viewers Like You, so please PWYC (suggested donation $5).