The 2023 Guest Editorship (Fiction) at carte blanche
is now accepting applications.
The deadline to apply is Friday, September 1.
Read the Call for Applications.
A component of QWF’s Fresh Pages Diversity Initiative, the Editorial Mentorship at carte blanche is a temporary, part-time, paid opportunity designed to help an aspiring literary artist who is Black, Indigenous, or a person of colour develop skills in selecting and editing work for a literary journal.
Learn about editing literary magazines and help curate a special fiction section at the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s online literary magazine, carte blanche.
Each year, the mentorship goes to a Quebec-based writer who shows promise and has demonstrated an interest in the chosen genre, but who has not yet had an opportunity to work as an editor.
The editorship provides:
- Approximately 15 hours of mentorship
- An $800 honorarium
- A free one-year membership in the Quebec Writers’ Federation
In 2023, the selected candidate will work with fiction editor Liana Cusmano to curate issue 47’s fiction section of carte blanche magazine.
The 2023 Mentor
Writer, spoken word artist, and arts educator Liana Cusmano (aka Luca/BiCurious George) was the 2018, 2019 and 2023 Montreal Slam Champion, runner-up in the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship, and a participant in the 2019 Spoken Word Residency Program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Their poems and short stories have been published in short story collections, anthologies and literary magazines, They wrote the screenplay for the short film La femme finale, screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and wrote and directed the award-winning Matters of Great Unimportance, screened at the 2019 Blue Metropolis Festival. They are Fiction Editor at the literary journal carte blanche and their first novel, Catch & Release (2022), was published by Guernica Editions. They were also a 2022 finalist for the QWF Spoken Word Prize. Cusmano
It was such a pleasure to work under the mentorship of Greg Santos as the Fresh Pages guest editor at carte blanche this autumn. It was such a rich experience that taught me a lot about the curatorial process—something that I was completely new to. I am so grateful to have been offered this mentorship with the help of Quebec Writers Federation. I am so happy that learning opportunities like this exist for BIPOC writers and creatives to explore the literary publication process.
Mahta Riaza, 2022 editorial mentorship
2023 Program – Fiction
Guest Editor: To be announced
carte blanche Editor: Liana Cusmano
2022 Program – Poetry
Guest Editor: Mahta Riazi
carte blanche Editor: Greg Santos
2021 Program – Non-Fiction
Guest Editor: Poonam Dhir
carte blanche Non-fiction Editor: Jenny Ferguson
2020 Program – Poetry
Guest Editor: Carolin Huang
carte blanche Poetry Editor: Marcela Huerta
