2025 Program—Spoken Word
Deadline: Wednesday, October 30, 2024
The 2025 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers is accepting applications from emerging and aspiring writers and literary performance artists. This year’s mentorship will be in spoken word. The 2025 mentor will be poet and spoken word artist Kama La Mackerel.
A component of QWF’s Fresh Pages Diversity Initiative, the mentorship is designed to help an aspiring Quebec-based writer or literary artist who is Indigenous, Black, or a person of colour develop their craft and transition to the next stage of their career.
The 2025 mentorship will go to an aspiring spoken word artist or writer who has a demonstrated interest in literary performance and/or spoken word. The selected artist will work with their mentor over the course of four months (February through May 2025) and participate in a public reading in early June 2025, alongside the participants in the other 2025 QWF Mentorships. Applicants should be prepared to dedicate at least 10 hours per week to their writing during that period.
The selected writer will receive an $800 honorarium and a free one-year membership in QWF.
The 2025 Mentor: Kama La Mackerel
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research, and community-arts facilitation.
Kama has lectured, performed, and exhibited their work internationally in museums, galleries, theatres, and universities. In 2021, they were awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. Their award-winning book ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and a Globe and Mail Best Debut. They are the author of the children’s book Indrazaal et la quête de l’océan (Éditions KATA) and they have translated works of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature by queer and trans Canadian authors such as Kai Cheng Thom and Vivek Shraya.
lamackerel.net // @KamaLaMackerel
Eligibility Criteria:
- Applicants must live in Quebec and be Indigenous, Black, or a person of colour.
- Applicants should have a demonstrated interest in spoken word and/or any kind of literary performance, including poetry, story, monologue, hip hop, dub, sound poetry, experimental or interdisciplinary work
- Applicants must be able to devote at least 10 hours a week to their writing during the months of February to May 2025.
- There is no age or publication requirement.
- Preference will be given to those who are not currently enrolled in a graduate writing program or working with a professional editor or publisher.
Timeline:
- Call for applications: October 3, 2024
- Deadline for applications: October 30, 2024
- Notification of results: December 2024
- Mentorship period: February 1, 2025 to May 31, 2025
- Public reading: June 2025
How to Apply:
Send the following to admin@qwf.org or mail it to or drop it off in the QWF office (address below).
- A cover letter describing the writing you’ve done so far and how the mentorship would make a difference in your writing life (maximum one page)
- A short statement about your background and writing experience, including the reason you are eligible for this initiative
- Your full name and a way to contact you
- A video sample (maximum 5 minutes) documenting your performance of an original text primarily in English and a written copy of the text; types of videos eligible for submission include:
- a recording of a live performance before an audience
- a recording of an online performance
- a self-made recording made in any location, with or without an audience
- A text version of the work you perform in your video sample
The following video formats are accepted:
- MP4 (MPEG-4 Video File)
- .AVI (Audio Video Interleave File)
- .3GP (3GPP Multimedia File)
- .WEBM (WebM Video File)
- .WMV (Windows Media File)
- .MKV (Matroska Video File)
- .MOV (Apple QuickTime Movie)
- .MPG (MPEG Video File)
- .FLV (Animate Video File)
- .M4V (iTunes Video File)
- YouTube video link
Please include the accompanying text version of your video sample as either a Word or PDF document.
Address for mail submissions:
Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship
Quebec Writers’ Federation
1200 Atwater Ave., Suite 3
Westmount, QC H3Z 1X4
About Mairuth Sarsfield
Mairuth Sarsfield (1925-2013) was born and raised in the Little Burgundy district of Montreal. She achieved distinction in every arena she entered: as a best-selling novelist and a journalist; working for Canada’s External Affairs Department at home and abroad; serving as press secretary for the Canadian delegation to the United Nations and as a senior information officer for the United Nations Environment Programme based in Nairobi, Kenya. She also served on the Board of Directors of the CBC. Among the many awards and honours she received are the Chevalier à l’Ordre national du Québec, the National Congress of Black Women Foundation’s First Literary Award for her novel No Crystal Stair, and the declaration of “Mairuth Sarsfield Day” by the City of Cleveland for her work on the “For Every Child a Tree” environmental campaign, which led to thousands of tree-planting projects around the world.
These accomplishments were nothing short of remarkable for any woman in twentieth-century North America. The fact that Mairuth Sarsfield achieved them, and more, as a Black woman, ensures her role as an inspiration for all future generations of young people from marginalized communities. With this mentorship program, the Quebec Writers’ Federation is proud to shine a spotlight on Ms. Sarsfield’s life and contributions to her city, her country, and the world.