A Virtual Evening with Ian Williams

Join Ian Williams, the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Reproduction, for a special virtual event. He’ll be discussing his new book, Disorientation: Being Black in the World (Random House Canada) with host Chimwemwe Undi. This event co-presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter.

In Disorientation, Ian Williams brings fresh eyes and new insights to today’s urgent conversation on race and racism in startling, illuminating essays that grow out of his own experience as a Black man moving through the world. With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly.

With these essays, Williams wants to reach a multi-racial audience of people who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Examining the past and the present in order to speak to the future, he offers new thinking, honest feeling, and his astonishing, piercing gift of language.

Host Chimwemwe Undi is a poet and lawyer based on Treaty 1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her writing and performance has been featured by Brick, Border Crossings, The Walrus and BBC World, among others. She is an editor for CV2 Magazine, and an alumnus of the Banff Emerging Writers Intensive.