Mile End Poets’ Festival 2019

Mile End Poets’ Festival will return in 2019! Watch this space for updates.

More information on MEPF can be found here. 

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The Mile End Poets’ Festival is a multidisciplinary arts festival focusing on literature in performance. Its goal was to present in a single local festival a range of the exciting artistic activity regularly taking place in and around Montreal’s Mile End district. The district is home to a huge number of poets, musicians, writers, dancers and performers.

The festival was founded in 2010 by Montreal poet, performer and curator Ian Ferrier, with help from writer/performers Moe Clark and Kaie Kellough. In its first year it was entirely artist-funded. It presented four nights of programming, each curated by a different artist or poet from the Mile End. This has been the model ever since. The festival now regularly receives much needed support from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Writers’ Federation. It presents work from multiple artistic communities with links to work by First Nations, literary and performance poetry artists, contemporary dancers, top artists from the city and elsewhere in Canada, and musicians who both tour internationally and regularly work in the neighbourhood’s exciting performance venues.

In 2017, Ian Ferrier was joined by Northern Irish poet & performer Rachel McCrum as Administrative Director for the Festival.