Kai Cheng Thom “I Hope We Choose Love” Toronto book launch

Another Story Bookshop and Arsenal Pulp Press present the Toronto launch of

“I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girls Notes from the End of the World” by Kai Cheng Thom

Saturday, September 28th @5pm
Bloor/Gladstone Library
1101 Bloor St West

Featuring a reading by Kai Cheng Thom and special guests Anthony Oliveira and Gwen Benaway

Co-sponsored by The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

Free – all welcome
Fully accessible

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, and performance artist, in Toronto. Her novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016. Her first poetry book, a place called No Homeland, and her children’s picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li, were both published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. An essay collection entitled I Hope We Choose Love is forthcoming in 2019. Kai Cheng won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.