The Sunday Book Club YYC

An Origin Story

It was a Sunday afternoon in mid-September 2025. Two friends, Iheoma Uzomba and Alison Elewa-Ikpakwu, found themselves wandering through a church trade event. The room was busy, well-intentioned, but oddly unsatisfying. Somewhere between the rally from table to table, a question surfaced, as good questions often do, in the midst of chaos: What else could a Sunday afternoon be for?

It took only a few seconds to birth an answer: book discussions. Sunday afternoons seemed perfect for books, for thinking aloud, for conversations that didn’t need to resolve themselves.

A couple Zoom calls and FaceTime videos later, The Sunday Book Club YYC was born, conceived as an open, welcoming community in Calgary for readers and conversationalists alike.

A space where books could act as starting points rather than endpoints, and where dialogue mattered just as much as interpretation.

The club’s guiding principle soon followed: for the love of books and better conversations.

By November 2025, the book club was officially underway. Its first gathering took place on November 30, bringing together fourteen people for an afternoon of thoughtful exchange centered on bell hooks’ All About Love.

The conversation unfolded easily, setting the tone for what the club hoped to become.

In the days that followed, details of the inaugural meeting were shared on social media. Within twenty-four hours, the community grew by more than one hundred new members, signaling an unmistakable hunger for spaces devoted to reading, reflection, and insightful conversation.

Iheoma and Alison have continued ever since to run the book club, gathering members on the last Sunday of every month to reflect on books, speak, and listen to each other.

Each meeting invites members to slow down, to think together, and to let literature open wider conversations about the world they inhabit.

The Sunday Book Club YYC provides a space committed to presence, to shared thought, and to the belief that some of the best things still happen when people sit in a room and talk.