Book Talk: Chrysalis with Anuja Varghese
- Date
- June 19, 2024
- Time
- 12:30 PM EDT - 1:00 PM EDT
- Location
- Online via Zoom
- Contact
- Adrianne Kenmir, Alumni Relations Officer, akenmir@torontomu.ca
Event Description:
Join us Wednesday June 19 for our special Pride Month Book Talk with Anuja Varghese, alumna and award-winning author of Chrysalis (external link, opens in new window) .
Featuring genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, Chrysalis, is by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and reveling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.
A celebrated new voice in Canadian literature, Anuja was the recipient of a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award and 2023 Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers.
About the Author:
Anuja Varghese
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Management ’19
Anuja Varghese (she/her) is an award-winning writer and editor based in Hamilton, ON. Her work appears in Hobart, Corvid Queen, Southern Humanities Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Plenitude Magazine, as well as the Queer Little Nightmares anthology, among others. Her debut short story collection, titled Chrysalis (House of Anansi Press, 2023) explores South Asian diaspora experience through a feminist, speculative lens. In 2023, Chrysalis won the Writers Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Find Anuja on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok (@anuja_v across platforms) or through her website anujavarghese.com (external link, opens in new window)
About the moderator:
Sabina Chatterjee
Project Manager of Equity, Training, and Partnerships with the Experiential Learning Hub, TMU
Sabina Chatterjee is the Project Manager of Equity, Training, and Partnerships with the Experiential Learning Hub at Toronto Metropolitan University. In this role, she supports special projects and associated team projects related to the priorities of the Experiential Learning (EL) Hub with an equity and community inclusion lens, intended to expand resources and support available to students, faculty, staff and community/industry partners engaging in various forms of experiential learning. Sabina is a long-time activist, community educator, and advocate for social justice, equity, and belonging. She has an extensive background in social service provision and organizational management, having created and directed support services for street-involved youth in southwestern Ontario, as well as anti-violence programs for multiracial and Indigenous youth in BC. As a community consultant, Sabina’s work has focused on developing trauma- and critical disability justice- informed programs, curricula, and evaluation frameworks that intentionally challenge anti-Indigenous, anti-Black racism, and other inequities.