Know When to FOLD ’em: Morgan Campbell Confirmed For The 2025 Festival of Literary Diversity

Don’t pencil it in.

Write it in your calendar in ink, first weekend in May.

The author of your Next Favourite Book is coming to one of Canada’s most important word nerd parties — the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton. If you’re not familiar with it, you’re about to learn. It was founded in 2016 by my good friend Jael Richardson, and it’s Canada’s “first literary festival devoted to celebrating underrepresented authors and storytellers.”

And so it’s yet another homecoming for My Fighting Family, a memoir set both in Chicago, where I’ll appear at the Southside Lit Fest in September, and in the western suburbs of Toronto. A chapter in my book titled “The Next Season” opens with my high school football team playing in Brampton, getting curb-stomped by the Bramalea Broncos.

The link to the host city is just one reason that this appearance at the FOLD felt inevitable.

Another is the connection to the host herself, Jael Richardson, a fellow author, obviously, and also a fellow Afro-Ameri-Canadian. There are a few of us out here, writing books, playing football, complaining that our biggest nemesis is Rappin’ Like He Bout to Get Da Slaves Freed, then escaping to Australia to avoid seeing the guy we picked a fight with shred us his SuperBowl halftime show.

Jael’s folks are from Ohio and mine are from Chicago, but both our families grew up in northwest Mississauga, and we go waaaaaaay back. My big sister, Courtney, and her big brother, Damon, were classmates… in preschool. A few years later Damon and I became little league football teammates — he was our star running back, while I was a chubby little speed bump of a two-way lineman.

And a handful of years after that, we became high school football rivals in the Serena Williams-Maria Sharapova sense. My team excelled at trash talk. His had mastered football. We made a lot of noise. They beat us by 30.

Nineteen years after that, I emceed the launch party for Jael’s first book, a highly readable and revealing memoir called The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson’s, A Father’s Life. And now, thirteen years later, Jael’s hosting me at the FOLD’s 10th anniversary.

I’m a little surprised it’s only been a decade. The FOLD is a fairly new event that already feels like part of the fabric of Brampton, alongside Shopper’s World, or the train station on Main St., or the ability to see the word “Chinguacousy” and pronounced it “Ching-Koo-Zee.”

As for my FOLD week schedule… it’s still developing. But I’m already booked for The Great Readception, which involves reading a few pages from your book while a jazz ensemble plays in the background. You already know how I feel about performing your work in public — if you have the voice and the personality for it, do it every chance you get. Before any of us could read and write, all of us could talk and listen, and its fun to break your book down to its lowest common storytelling denominator.

And if you’ve read My Fighting Family, you know that music is to my family what the Sweet Science is to the Mayweathers. It’s the family business, and the vehicle that propelled some of us to places we never thought’d we’d see.

Like Canada.

Music is definitely the reason we’re here, and it’s a thread that runs though the text from prologue to postscript.

If I follow it long enough it’ll lead me right back to a stage at a book festival in Brampton, and I’m thrilled for the opportunity.

Registration opens March 19.

You’re all invited.

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