Program Mentors:
Hari Alluri
Laura Broadbent
Margaret Christakos
Stephen Collis
Junie Désil
Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Erín Moure
Sachiko Murakami
Fred Wah
Rita Wong
The Capilano Review invites applications from emerging writers for its 2022 Emerging Writers’ Mentorship Program. Accepted mentees in the program will have the opportunity to meet virtually with one of ten assigned program mentors to discuss their work during a free, one-hour consultation.
This opportunity is offered to emerging writers, defined as anyone who has not yet published a full-length work. Priority will be given to Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, queer and trans people, working-class and underemployed people, disabled people, and other writers from historically marginalized groups who may have had lesser access to mentorship opportunities of this kind. We encourage applicants to self-identify in their application.
Up to twenty placements are available. All mentorships will be provided free of charge, with individual consultations taking place over Zoom during the month of November.
To be considered for a placement, please email contact@thecapilanoreview.com with the subject line “Emerging Writers’ Mentorship Program 2022” by the deadline of October 31st.
Please include, in the body of your email:
- A short bio
- A one-page description of your project, including any specific questions you may have about it
- Up to 10 pages of material-in-progress you would like to receive feedback on (attached as a separate PDF/Word document)
Successful applicants will be notified the first week of November.
About the Mentors:
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya, 2017), Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013) and The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016). A recipient of the Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Fellowship for Poets of Color and the Federico Moramarco Poetry International Teaching Prize, Alluri has also been awarded grants from the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the National Film Board of Canada. His work appears widely in anthologies, journals, and online venues including Poetry, PRISM Intern
Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Invisible), which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Interviews (Metatron Press) and In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books). She has a masters degree in literature and creative writing, is a PhD dropout and currently works as a professional ghostwriter in Montreal, QC. Her work has been published and anthologized internationally both in print and online, she has been a judge for the Penn International Poetry Contest, has facilitated creative writing workshops both independently and within university programs and has edited many a poetry manuscript. Recipient of numerous artist grants, Laura is currently working on a new poetry manuscript, a collection of experimental essays and a novel.
Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. She is a white setter bisexual poet, writer, image-maker and poetry mentor engaged since the 1990s in an experimental lyric feminist poetics of relationality, direct and indirect address, voice and touch, order and disorder, memory and public listening, and since 2010 especially in a social media context. She has published eleven collections of poetry, a multimodal memoir and a novel.
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008), On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016), and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021). He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Junie Désil is a poet. Born of immigrant (Haitian) parents on the traditional territories of the Kanien’kehà:ka on the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), raised in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). Junie’s debut poetry collection, Eat Salt | Gaze at the Ocean (Talonbooks, 2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Tawhida Tanya Evanson is a poet, author, artist and producer from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her two poetry collections are Bothism (Ekstasis 2017) and Nouveau Griot (Frontenac 2018). Her first novel Book of Wings (Véhicule 2021) is a finalist for the 2022 Nouvel Apport/New Horizons Prize, was on the 2022 CBC Canada Reads Longlist and one of Quill & Quire’s 2021 Books of the Year. With an award-winning, 25-year practice in spoken word, she performs internationally, and has released several studio albums and videopoems. Director of the Banff Centre Spoken Word program and VP of The Quebec Writers’ Federation, she is at work on an Afrofuturist concert documentary set for 2023. She moonlights as a whirling dervish.
Erín Moure’s translation of Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (Circumference, 2019) was a 2020 Best Translated Book Award finalist. Recent translations are Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz, 2020), Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug, 2020), and The Face of the Quartzes by Chus Pato (Veliz, 2021). Moure’s most recent poetry is The Elements (Anansi, 2019). She lives and works in Montréal.
Sachiko Murakami (she/her) is the author of Render (2020), Get Me Out of Here (2015), Rebuild (2011), and The Invisibility Exhibit (2008). Her work has been twice shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. As a literary worker, she has edited books of poetry, taught creative writing, worked for trade organizations, ran literary events, sat on juries, and judged prizes. She lives, writes, and teaches in Toronto (Treaty 13/Dish With One Spoon territory).
Fred Wah’s most recent project is Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1-170 (Talonbooks, 2020). Also recently, a collaboration with Rita Wong about the Columbia River, beholden: a poem as long as the river. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online at www.highmuckamuck.ca. He lives in Vancouver and on Kootenay Lake.
Rita Wong lives on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ lands. She is a poet-scholar who has written several books of poetry and co-edited an anthology with Dorothy Christian entitled Downstream: Reimagining Water (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2017). Wong works to support Indigenous communities’ efforts towards justice and health for water and land.
