The 2020 QWF Mentorship Program

Please scroll down to see the selected Mentors and Mentees for the 2020 QWF Mentorship Program.

Applications for the 2021 QWF Mentorship Program will open in September 2020.

If you are Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Colour, you may be eligible for The Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship. The call for applications for 2021 will open in September 2020.

Mentorship pairs at the 2019 reading (clockwise from back left):
Joanne Latimer, Anna Leventhal, Raquel Rivera, Gerald Wexler, Ashley Duong, Heather Leighton, Anya Leibovitch and Shelagh Plunkett. Not pictured: Shannon Webb-Campbell & Claudia Janampa Huamán (poetry), and Daniel Canty & Carla Stewart (fiction).

The QWF Mentorship program is designed to help promising emerging writers make the transition to the next stage of their careers. Both mentors and mentees are selected by an independent jury.

Over a period of four months (February to May), each mentee gets one-on-one guidance and support from a professional writing mentor. At the end of the mentorship period, there is a public reading at which the mentees present their work-in-progress.

Mentors are expected to devote 35 to 40 hours to reading and responding to their protégé’s work and giving guidance towards the goal of publication or production. Mentees are expected to commit a minimum of 15 to 20 hours per month to the program.

The Fresh Pages Initiative: The Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship

The Quebec Writers’ Federation is delighted to announce the call for applications for the inaugural Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship. The mentorship, which is a component of QWF’s “Fresh Pages” initiative, is designed to help an aspiring writer or playwright who is Indigenous, Black or a person of colour to develop their literary writing.

The mentorship will go to a Quebec-based poet who has already demonstrated an interest in literary writing and who has at least ten poems completed or in progress (Other genres will be addressed in subsequent years, should funding allow.) The selected writer will work with their mentor over the course of four months (February through May, 2020) and participate in a public reading in June 2020. More information here