Empowerment Series 2025

Étienne Beaulieu

Écrivain, professeur, éditeur, Étienne Beaulieu dirige les éditions Nota bene et les éditions Varia, enseigne la littérature au cégep de Drummondville et est directeur général et artistique des Correspondances d’Eastman. Son dynamisme, sa passion pour la littérature, son engagement envers l’écologie font de lui une figure importante dans le monde des idées au Québec. Il est l’auteur primé de plusieurs ouvrages, notamment dans le genre de l’essai, parus en France et au Québec : La traversée du vide; Les rêves du ookpik; Trop de lumière pour Samuel Gaska; La pomme et l’étoile; Splendeur au bois Beckett; L’âme littéraire; Sang et lumière. La communauté du sacré dans le cinéma québécois.

Ben Caplan

The Jewish artist and musician Ben Caplan is both the roar of the hurricane and the eye of the storm. He has an uncanny ability to channel both wild abandon and quiet introspection. His songwriting pulls from many diverse influences, but both his music and his lyrics regularly draw from his Jewish heritage. Often mixing biblical imagery and klezmer inflected melodies, Caplan re-appropriates ancient sounds and themes with a decidedly contemporary twist.

Nelly Duvicq 

Nelly Duvicq vit, depuis 15 ans, à Ivujivik, le village le plus au nord du Québec, d’où elle participe à de nombreux projets de recherche et d’édition visant à mettre en valeur le patrimoine littéraire écrit de la littérature inuite. Elle enseigne également le français (depuis 2015) pour la commission scolaire Kativik Ilisarniliriniq à l’école Nuvviti.  Originaire du Sud-Ouest de la France, elle s’est envolée pour Montréal en 2007, afin d’y poursuivre un doctorat en études littéraires à l’UQAM, doctorat qu’elle a obtenu en 2015. Son sujet portait sur la littérature écrite du Nunavik depuis les années 1950. Sa thèse a été publiée sous le titre Histoire de la littérature inuite du Nunavik (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2019). Nelly Duvicq a en outre obtenu une maîtrise en enseignement en 2023. Son sujet portait sur l’enseignement de la littérature inuit au niveau secondaire. La littérature est toujours au cœur de ses projets et tient une place primordiale dans sa classe. Depuis trois ans, elle participe avec ses élèves au projet Un livre à la fois, qui consiste à familiariser les jeunes à la création littéraire, à l’illustration d’un texte et à la compréhension des étapes de production d’un livre.

Yara El-Ghadban

Yara El-Ghadban est romancière, éditrice et anthropologue. Depuis 2017, elle est la présidente de l’Espace de la diversité, un organisme qui cherche à combattre le racisme et l’exclusion par le biais du livre et de la littérature.
Elle est en outre l’autrice de quatre romans aux éditions Mémoire d’encrier dont La danse des flamants roses, paru en 2024. Le roman a remporté le Prix Mare Nostrum dans la catégorie Roman méditerranéen et il est finaliste au Prix Frontières 2025. En 2021 elle cosigne avec Rodney Saint-Éloi l’essai Les racistes n’ont jamais vu la mer, finaliste au Prix des libraires 2022. Yara El-Ghadban est lauréate du Prix Victor-Martyn-Lynch-Staunton du Conseil des arts du Canada 2017.
Elle est actuellement éditrice aux éditions Mémoire d’encrier.

Mateo García Elizondo

Mateo García Elizondo is a screenwriter, actor and author. In his debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, he follows a drug addict as he tries to find one last fix in a town infested with ghosts and not come back. This novel won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish. His work has appeared in magazines such as Nexos, Revista Casa de las Américas, Quimera, Origami, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. He has written scripts for film and graphic narrative, including the screenplay for the feature film Desierto (2015), which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the world’s best writers in Spanish under thirty-five years of age. García Elizondo is also a celebrated actor, appearing in films such as Tótem (2023), which received rave reviews from both The Guardian and The New York Times. He is also the grandson of legendary Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. After working as a human rights lawyer, and a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and the BBC, he has authored six non-fiction books including Mukiwa, which won the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire, Apple, Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book, The Fear, was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. Godwin has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia and served as President of PEN American Center. His latest book is Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars.

Juana Libedinsky

Juana Libedinsky is a writer, lecturer and journalist from Argentina now based in New York. She has been named a New York Observer Fellow at NYU, Wolfson Press fellow at Cambridge University, and is a member of the Azul Programming Committee of Blue Metropolis/Metropolis Bleu, the Montreal International Literary Festival in Canada. She is Professor of Cultural Journalism at the Universidad San Pablo CEU (Madrid). Her stories and columns have been published in Vanity Fair (Spain), Vogue (France), Condé Nast Traveler (Spain), GQ (Mexico and Latin America). She is a columnist for La Nación (Argentine national daily) and cultural correspondent for El País (Uruguayan national daily). She is the author of Cuesta Abajo and the collection English Breakfast: El Pensamiento Británico Hoy, a compilation of her interviews with British intellectuals, both published in the Spanish language in Argentina. Downhill (Urano US) is Juana’s debut memoir and will be her first book published in English; the Spanish edition, Cuesta Abajo, was recently published in Argentina and has been praised by La Nación, El País, Clarín, ABC, and other popular Spanish language publications and media outlets.

Stephie Mazunya

Stephie Mazunya est une artiste trilingue et pluridisciplinaire née au Burundi et élevée à Ottawa. Depuis sa sortie de l’École nationale de théâtre en 2019, elle a collaboré à plusieurs pièces dont Soifs matériaux, Les louves et Nassara. À la télévision, on a pu la voir dans Société distincte, Avant le crash, Eaux turbulentes, Double faute et Vraiment top. Sur le web, elle fait partie de la saison 2 de la série Moi j’habite nulle part. Elle s’intéresse également au chant, à l’écriture et à la traduction.

Cristina Rivera Garza

Author. Translator. Critic. Latest book: Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Pulitzer Prize 2024. Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and head of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. MacArthur Fellow 2020-2025. Artist-in-Residence DAAD Berlin, 2023-2024. Maria Zambrano fellow at the University of Barcelona. 2023-2024. 
Her others most recent books are Autobiografía del algodón (Random House Literature, 2020), and Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country (The Feminist Press, 2020, translated by Sarah Booker, 2021 NBCC Award Finalist). New and Selected Stories, translated by Sarah Booker, was published by the Dorothy Project in 2022.

David Chariandy

David Chariandy FRSC (he/him) is a writer and critic.  Author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother, and the epistolary memoir I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter, his books have been widely discussed, translated into a dozen languages, and awarded the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Toronto Book Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.  As a critic, he has contributed substantially to the field of Black Canadian literature through articles, book chapters, publishing initiatives, and co-edited special issues of journals.  He is a member of the editorial board of Brick: A literary journal and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Division of Arts. Professor Chariandy’s goals are to support creative writing, to organize cultural events bridging the public/academic divide, and to deepen space for the study of Black, Caribbean, and Canadian literatures.  A specialist in prose forms, his recent writing projects confront auto-theory, ‘critical fabulation,’ and disjunction in diasporic narration.  Having served on executive, steering, or advisory committees for the Writer’s Union of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Vancouver Public Library, the Public Lending Right Program, Broadview Press, and McClelland & Stewart Press, he remains multiply engaged in the rapidly shifting ecology of writing, publishing, and reading in Canada.