Elizabeth Renzetti and Lisa Moore Discuss Social Justice

On October 6th, join us for a discussion over brunch, as bestselling authors Elizabeth Renzetti and Lisa Moore each give us their take on social justice in their latest books. Tickets include a full brunch and a $25 gift voucher towards a book purchase at the event. 

In What She Said, a passionate advocate for gender equity, and one of our most respected journalists, explores the most pressing issues facing women in Canada today with humour and heart. 

The fight for women’s rights was supposed to have been settled. Or, to put it another way, women were supposed to have settled—for what we were grudgingly given, for the crumbs from the table that we had set. For thirty per cent of the seats in Canada’s Parliament; for five per cent of the CEO’s offices; for a tenth of the salary of male athletes; for the tiny per cent of sexual assault cases that result in convictions; for tenuous control over our health and bodies. “Aren’t we over it yet? No, we’re not,” Elizabeth Renzetti writes.    

 Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack’s case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts. 

Elizabeth Renzetti is a bestselling Canadian author and journalist. She has worked for the Globe and Mail, where she served as the paper’s Arts and Books editor. In 2020 she won the Landsberg Award for her reporting on gender equality. She is the author of the essay collection Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls, the novel Based on a True Story. Her first mystery (co-authored with Kate Hilton), Bury the Lead, was published in 2024. She lives in Toronto with her family. 

Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator (all shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, among other honours); the story collections Open (also shortlisted for the Giller Prize) and Something for Everyone; and the young adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (February). Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.