Writer-Facilitators

Larissa Andrusyshyn completed an MA in English and creative writing at Concordia University. Her first poetry collection Mammoth (DC Books 2010) was longlisted for the ReLit award, and shortlisted for the QWF first book prize and the Kobzar literary award. Her second poetry collection Proof (DC Books) was published in 2014. Her poems have been a finalist for Arc Magazine’s Poem-of-the-Year, the CBC Poetry Prize and the 3 Macs carte blanche Prize. She facilitates creative writing workshops in Montreal and is currently working on a new poetry manuscript and her first novel.

Marie Barlizo is a Montreal-based Filipino-Chinese playwright, screenwriter, producer, dramaturg, and mom of two. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (TV) from UBC and is the first BIPOC to graduate from the National Theatre School’s Playwriting Program. She’s an instructor and playwriting mentor at NTS and NTS’ Public Courses, mentor at Imago Theatre’s Nested Circles (2024-25), recipient of the 2022 Bernard Amyot Teaching Award at National Theatre School and winner of the 2022 Jovette Marchessault award for Playwriting. Select Credits: residency at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (2022-2025); residency at Native Earth Performing Arts (2024); residency at Performance Laboratory, Inc (Philippines, 2024); residency at Boca del Lupo (2023); Lucky excerpt published in Canadian Theatre Review (193), 2023; Lucky production at 2022 rEvolver Festival; The Little Mighty Superhero, Geordie Theatre 20-21 2Play Tour

Ryan is a writer and podcast producer who specializes in creative non-fiction storytelling. His books include Buster: A Life in Pictures (Knockabout Media, 2023) and The Raftsmen (Firefly Books, 2017/Éditions Glénat, 2021). He is also the writer/host of the podcast Once Upon a Time in Hollywood North, and the producer of others series including Among Equals: The History and Legacy of the PNIAI, The Story of a National Crime, and the forthcoming The Story Girl: The Life and Works of L.M. Montgomery.

Website: knockaboutmedia.com

Lea Beddia is an author for young adults, a storyteller, and a high school English teacher. Her books have been voted on the Best Books list by The Canadian Children Book Centre She is a teaching artist and workshop facilitator with twenty years’ experience working with at-risk youth. She is passionate about creating accessible literature to struggling readers. Lea grew up in Montreal and now teaches in Joliette, Quebec, where she lives with her husband and three children.

Barry Bilinsky is a professional theatre creator of Metis, Cree, and Ukrainian heritage. He has worked as a director, curator, performing artist, stage manager, and technical/production manager across Canada with projects centred primarily around the proliferation of Indigenous arts, artists, and collaborations. He studied Drama and English at the University of Alberta, attaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2012. Barry is an Artistic Associate with Dreamspeakers Indigenous Film Festival and has been involved with Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts, The Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society, Iiniistsi Treaty Arts Society (REDx Talks), and Fool Spectrum Theatre. Barry is committed to developing honest, respectful, and purposefully compassionate creations that challenge the overarching cultural assumptions often faced in the performing arts community.

Métis/mixed-settler multidisciplinary artist Moe Clark is a 2Spirit singing thunderbird. She works across disciplines of vocal improvisation, spoken word, sound design, and performance creation, to create work that centres embodied knowledge, 2Spirit Indigenous resurgence, and creative kinship. Originally from Treaty 7, Moe has resided as a guest in Tio’tiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal for more than a decade. Moe has performed the world over, including the Sydney Opera House (AU), UBUD Writers & Readers Festival (ID) and Origins Festival in London (UK). Moe has seven albums of music, both solo and collaborative and multiple performance videos. Her last solo album Within toured across North America and her collaborative video poem “nitahkôtân” won best Indigenous language music video at the ImagiNative film festival. In 2013 she directed the 10th Annual Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, highlighting Indigenous Languages, and was named Poet of Honour at the same festival in 2014. As a composer, Moe’s music and voice have appeared in film, theatre and dance performances alike, including Imago Theatre’s The Flood (2024), Ce Silence qui Tue (Kim O’Bomsawin, 2018), and Winnie Ho’s aWokening (2022). She is co-founder of Weather Beings, a 2Spirit performance collective with Mâori interdisciplinary artist Victoria Hunt (AU).

www.moeclark.ca

https://www.instagram.com/moeclark/

Michael “BeWyrd” Clarke is a poet based in Tio’tia:ke (aka Montréal). He has performed solo and in collaboration with poets, musicians, and dancers across Canada at poetry slams, live events, and festivals. In 2023, he received QWF’s Ian Ferrier Spoken Word Prize. His poetry explores the music of the voice, the legacy of trauma, and the hope in every breath. He is the president of the Throw! Poetry Collective which showcases competitive yet friendly bilingual poetry slams once a month. Every year, he helps produce the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) as part of the Verses Festival of Words in Vancouver. He has a Master’s degree in Educational Technology and is currently working on a studio album.

Writer, poet, and filmmaker Liana Cusmano (aka Luca/BiCurious George) is a three-time Montreal Slam Champion and runner up in the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship. Their first novel, Catch & Release (2022), was published by Guernica Editions. They were a finalist for the 2022 QWF Spoken Word Prize and winner of the 2024 Society Pages Poetry Contest.

Tawhida Tanya Evanson is a poet, novelist, scriptwriter, artist and Ashiq known for her innovative work blending poetry, orality, music and multimedia. A graduate of Concordia University Creative Writing born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, she performs and teaches internationally, has produced five audio recordings, six short films and the 2023 award-winning Afrofuturist concert film CYANO SUN SUITE. Evanson has two published poetry collections, and her debut novel Book of Wings won the 2022 CAM/Blue Metropolis New Contribution Prize. Her French autotranslation Livre des ailes was published in 2023. She is 2025 Poet Ambassador in Residence at the League of Canadian Poets, current president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation and moonlights as a whirling dervish.

April L. Ford is a writer and teacher who specializes in trauma-informed approaches. She’s the author of the award-winning books Carousel: A Novel (Inanna) and The Poor Children: Stories (SFWP), and a series of chapbooks that explore the time-old themes of love and loss, but with her stamp of frankness and dark humor. She’s the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for her short story “Project Fumarase,” and her personal essay “I Will Tell You This Much, and Then We’ll Never Talk About It” was a finalist for The Lascaux Review’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction. 

Mona Gendron (she/her) is a Montreal-based writer, transfemme white settler, and educator. Her work has appeared in many journals, including CV2, Antilang, and The Puritan, for whom she was a 2021 Pushcart nominee. With her music project Puberty Well she has released an album, The Boys are Homophobic Sweethearts, and performed at Sled Island Music Festival in 2023, Sappyfest, and POP Montreal in 2024. Alongside the above, she has spent over a decade nurturing Montreal’s vibrant DIY music and arts community, facilitating a wide array of arts events across several venues and collectives. She is currently working on a surrealistic novel-in-verse-in-prose, Bride.

Banafsheh Hassani بنفشه حسنی (any/all pronouns) is an Iranian Montreal-based feminist theatre creator and practitioner. They have a BFA in Performance Creation from Concordia University with distinction. Banafsheh is preoccupied with home, memory, dreams, identity, un/changing and relations (blood and otherwise), and all that would happen if only “home [was not] the mouth of a shark” (home, Warsan Shire). They are currently nurturing their growing creative concern and longtime inquietude for diasporic and immigrant lives and experiences. His plays have had readings through Teesri Duniya Theatre’s Fireworks playwriting program and Playwright Workshop Montreal’s Young Creators Unit. As an actor, she most recently appeared in Wine&Halva by award-winning playwright Deniz Başar. As a teacher, they are also working at Geordie Theatre School.

Roen Higgins is an award-winning spoken word poet, educator, and speaker. As the founder of The Elevated Creative, her mission is to elevate others through creative literacy and help get them unstuck and tap into their genius zone. She is dedicated to planting the seed that creativity should be fostered, valued, and celebrated at home and school. Dubbed as Blu’Rva, Roen is known as a repeat winner in the scene of improv & slam poetry and has performed from local stages to festival du monde as an independent artist. She is a long-time member of The Poets Tree and Kalmunity Vibe Collective. Roen is a graduate in Human Relations and Family Life Education from Concordia University. Her creative contributions were recognized by the Black Theatre Workshop with the Gloria Mitchell-Aleong Award (2012).

She has been featured in the CBC Arts online series (2021) and the poetry anthology Talking Book (2006, Cumulus Press).

Originally from the UK, Annabel Howard is an author of creative nonfiction. She has been a guest in Tio’tiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal for four years. She has published three books, translated into eleven languages, and her essays, poems, and prose-poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Canadian Essays, The White Review, The Puritan, Demeter Press, and Emergence Magazine. Besides writing, Annabel has twenty years experience as a teacher, facilitator, and mentor who’s worked with children, high school students, undergraduates, and adults in art galleries, museums, classrooms, and outdoors. 

Emily Tristan Jones is an alumna of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Banff Centre, and University of Chicago (where she won the new poet prize). She started Hermes Gallery in Nova Scotia and has curated exhibitions for Dalhousie University and other venues. Her first book of poetry will be published by Chicago-based press, Verge. Pieces have been in The Puritan, EcoTheo, Harvard Review, Vallum, Denver Quarterly, Shearsman, and other journals. She lives in Montreal, where she runs Columba Poetry, and is currently writing with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

Kate Lavut is an award-winning playwright, whose first play A Little Bit Pregnant won best drama at the New York City Fringe Festival. She is also a comic book creator, who wrote and illustrated ‘Chico’, about that time she dressed as a boy, jumped on the bus, and went to Mexico. Lavut was born in Toronto but doesn’t admit that to people, now that she resides in Montreal. A natural teacher, Kate has been said to do therapy with her students as well as creative writing. Kate Lavut is currently at work on her new play Dating My Mother.

www.PaperDogPress.com

Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer, editor, and curator. Originally from Northern Ireland, she lived in Edinburgh, Scotland between 2010 and 2016, where she was the first BBC Scotland Poet in Residence and recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Her debut collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate was translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in Fall 2020 and was a finalist for the Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole from the Quebec Writers’ Federation in 2022. She has taught workshops on poetry and performance in Scotland, Ireland, England, South Africa, Greece, Haiti and Canada. Her new show La Belle-mère//The Stepmother, co-written with Amélie Prévost, will premiere in Montreal in September 2024.  Rachel is the vocalist for noise-poetry group Pigs&Wolves.

For more information: https://rachelmccrumpoetperformer.wordpress.com/

Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been featured in print and online, as well as anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, Anthologie de la poesie actuelle des femmes au Québec, Letters from Montreal, and in the forthcoming Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health. She is the author of poetry collections Girth and Scorpion Season, as well as the memoir Nothing Will Be Different, which was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for nonfiction. She writes the cultural criticism newsletter Theatre of Cruelty on Substack, hosts Drawn & Quarterly’s Indigenous Literatures Book Club, is a storyteller and cultural animator for children, and is a freelance critic of art, music, literature, and theatre. She is primed and ready for your paid writing opportunity. Contact her at girthgirl.ca or taramcgowanross.substack.com

Born in Montreal to Egyptian/Lebanese parents, Nadine Neema is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist with 15+ years of experience. She has four albums of songs and spoken word poetry. She has toured internationally opening for artists such as Joe Cocker and Elton John and was mentored by Leonard Cohen, who co-produced her second album. She leads creativity, songwriting, creative writing, poetry, and storytelling workshops to empower people to find their own voice. She published the YA historical fiction novel Journal of a Travelling Girl set on the Tłįchǫ ancestral lands in the Northwest Territories. The book, which was shortlisted for three awards, was inspired by footage from her award-winning short film entitled Wekweètì et Ekwǫ̀. Nadine began working in Wekweètì, NWT in 1999 with the Tłįchǫ people, first as a community manager, then assisting with land claims negotiations. She maintains a strong bond with the community through workshops, photography projects, and canoe trips. 

www.neema.ca
www.journalofatravellinggirl.com/

Raquel Rivera is a writer, performer, and author of books for children and young adults. She is based in Montreal since 1999. Prior to this Raquel has lived and worked in Washington DC, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Barcelona, and Toronto, where she was born and raised. Her travel experiences and mixed heritage have led her to write on themes such as opposing viewpoints, cultures in conflict and cooperation.  More recently Raquel been researching present-day thinking on—and actions for—global sustainability. With more than 20 years’ writing experience in literary and commercial genres, working in different cultures around the world, Raquel takes great pleasure in sharing knowledge with fellow- writers, working with children, youth and adults in creative collaborations of all kinds. For these collaborations, she also draws on her background in visual art and visual literacy, as well as her practice in movement, rhythm and performance.