Zalika Reid-Benta In Conversation with Wendy O’Brien

Join us at Wooden Sticks Golf Club for Books and Brunch with Zalika Reid-Benta.

Your $60 ticket includes a full hot buffet brunch and a signed copy of Zalika’s newest novel, River Mumma.

From the Giller-nominated author of Frying Plantain comes an exhilarating magical realist novel about a millennial Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a quest through the streets of Toronto

ZALIKA REID-BENTA is a Toronto-based writer whose debut story collection, Frying Plantain, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Frying Plantain was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the White Pine Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Zalika served as the 2021-2022 Writer in Residence at Western University and was the chair of the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She received an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is an alumnus of the Banff Centre Writing Studio.

WENDY O’BRIEN is a philosopher with an avid interest in the ways philosophy, literature and the visual arts overlap. After over 30 years in academe teaching and lecturing at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Harvard and Oxford, she recently retired to be able to explore these points of intersection in non-academic settings. Her work explores subjects including power, violence, the relation to the Other, home, silence and creativity. She is presently working on a long-term project on the concept of wonder. An active member of the Ontario literary scene, she has been an interviewer for organizations including By the Lake Book Club, the Toronto International Festival of Authors and GritLit, as well as hosting Bourbon and Books book club in both Toronto and Hamilton.