Another Story Bookshop, Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto and Scholar Strike Canada present
In-person Toronto Book Launch for Rehearsals for Living

with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Hosted by Beverly Bain
With music by DJ Murr from LAL
Thursday, June 16 @7pm

Sponsored by Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, York University, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies, Queens University and Penguin Random House of Canada. This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of Toronto Artscape Inc.

When the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, renowned artist, musician, and author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. These letters soon grew into a powerful exchange about where we go from here.

Rehearsals for Living is a captivating and visionary work—part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and reiterating the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment, Maynard and Simpson create something new: an urgent demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up other ways of ordering earthly life.