Blue Metropolis
International Literature Festival
Arwa Younis is a community organizer, educator, and outreach coordinator based in Montreal. She has been part of Montreal City Mission since 2019, where she works closely with refugees, newcomers, and women to create spaces for connection, learning, and belonging.
Arwa is currently completing a Master of Social Work at McGill University, building on her background in education and community economic development. Over the years, she has coordinated and supported more than ten in-person and online initiatives across the arts, education, and social sectors, often focusing on cross-cultural dialogue and community-led collaboration.
She has also contributed to research on refugee families during the COVID-19 pandemic and has represented her organization in public conversations and media. Grounded in lived experience and long-term relationships, Arwa believes in slow, relational work and the power of listening as the foundation for meaningful social change.
How can we forge new forms of coming home to ourselves? On his sophomore album Blurring Time (2025), Bells Larsen collapses time into a series of patient ceremonies. Guided by the satisfaction of simply “being” as a political act, the record explores the ways we write the ever-arriving self into existence. Oscillating between lo-fi 90s indie and searing folk ballads, Larsen’s project features the haunting accompaniment of voices frozen in time. Intentionally designed to align with the timeline of his transition, he recorded his previous “high” voice and instrumentation in 2022, waited for his voice to drop after starting testosterone, and asked longtime friend and frequent collaborator Georgia Harmer to arrange harmonies for his new “low” voice. Together, they created a multilingual, intentional act of surrendering to change. Unlike past projects where vocals were set in the backdrop, Blurring Time unites both voices at the forefront, delivering an unyielding devotional.
Blurring Time was longlisted for the 2025 Polaris Prize, spent five weeks at #1 on the Canadian campus radio charts, and garnered press in The Guardian, NPR, The Toronto Star, Billboard, Paste, The Line of Best Fit, Under the Radar, and The CBC. Larsen has shared stages with Buck Meek (Big Thief), Land of Talk, Dan Mangan, and Martha Wainwright, and recently appeared at the Pitchfork London Music Festival. While his past projects have reached outward in love and loss, Blurring Time archives Larsen’s journey of self-actualization, harmonizing voices of past and present into a quiet submission to the constant state of becoming.
Carol-Ann Hoyte is the Events and Program Manager at The Canadian Children’s Book Centre. During her 20+ years in the children’s book industry, she has been a public library circulation clerk, reviewer, school librarian, and bookseller. Carol-Ann is a children’s poet whose work has appeared in School Magazine Australia and U.S. anthologies published by Pomelo Books. She has self-published two international children’s poetry collections: And the Crowd Goes Wild!: A Global Gathering of Sports Poems and Dear Tomato: An International Crop of Food and Agriculture Poems. Carol-Ann is mother to one son and is an avid papercrafter and lover of musicals. She lives in Montreal
Licia Canton has published short fiction, nonfiction and poetry in English, French, Mandarin, Italian and a Venetian dialect. She is the author of The Pink House and Other Stories (2018) and Almond Wine and Fertility (2008, 2018), translated into Italian as Vino alla mandorla e fertilità (2015). She is co-founder of Accenti Magazine, where she organized the annual writing contest and workshop series. She is (co)editor of fourteen volumes, including A Literary Harvest: Canadian Writing About Wine and Other Libations (2024) and two volumes titled Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing (2021, 2024). Dr. Canton is co-director of the Queer Italian-Canadian Artists Research Project at U of Toronto and the director of the documentary film Creative Spaces: Queer and Italian Canadian (2021). She was translator-in-residence at the University of Hull, UK, and Writer-in-Residence at University of Calabria, Italy. A former board member and mentor at the Quebec Writers’ Federation, she is listed in the Hire-a-Writer directory. For her work in culture, she received the Italy in the World Prize (2018). She holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal and an M.A. from McGill University.
Sue Todd _ The Illustrator
Sue Todd is an award-winning illustrator with more than 20 years of experience creating art for children’s and adult publishing, editorial, packaging, public art, festival posters and tarot game cards. Sue’s work is both her hobby and passion, and she creates illustrations in two styles: traditional hand-carved linocut; and digital line art in black and white and colour. In addition to commissioned illustration, Sue is writing and illustrating her own stories for young people, all works-in-progress.
Gillian Sze _ The Author and Teacher
Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books and picture books. Her work An Orange, A Syllable won the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 2025. Her collection Quiet Night Think received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in 2023. Her books have also been finalists for various literary awards such as the Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards. Gillian’s work has been translated into Slovenian, French, Italian, Turkish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Greek. She teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.
Kennedy Rooke _ The Manager
Kennedy Rooke is the manager of Librairie Drawn & Quarterly and has been a bookseller for over fifteen years.
Raquel Rivera _ The Author
Raquel Rivera is the author of fiction and creative non-fiction books for children and young adults. Her books have won the QWF Prize for Children’s and YA Literature, twice; they’ve been nominated for the Red Cedar Book Award, Silver Birch Forest of Reading Award and the Rocky Mountain Book Award, and were selected for CCBC Best Books for Kids & Teens (starred selection), USBBY Outstanding International Books (Grades 3-5), Quill & Quire’s “Best of 2007” (Children’s), and more. Her upcoming picture book is slated for release by Groundwood Books.
Raquel has lived and worked in Washington DC, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Barcelona and Toronto (where she was born and raised as a first-generation Canadian).
Based in Montreal since 1999, Raquel works as a writer, teaching-artist, and performer, while leading workshops and mentorships for children, youth and adults.
Visit her website at www.raquelriverawashere.com
Aisha Nyerere _ The Poet
Aisha Nyerere is a nineteen-year-old Tanzanian-Canadian aspiring poet. Although she has always enjoyed writing, her poetry journey began in 2024 as a personal project of preparing her first poetry collection. Since starting that project, she has had the honor of having her poem, Laughing Matters, published in Quist Literary Magazine and another poem, Ode to Khanga, showcased on the official website of the for the Julius Nyerere Leadership Center, which works in conjunction with Makerere University. She also regularly performs her work at open mics and has received offers to do spoken word performances at local events. She is currently editing her collection, How Many Echoes Create a New Sound?, and plans to publish it as a chapbook by the end of 2026.
Curran Katsi’tsohrónkwas Jacobs is an educator from the community of Kahnawà:ke. She is invested in the reclaiming of identity, culture and language within her community, working specifically on reconnecting youth to their inheritance: their Indigenous identities. She has taught in every setting, from 3 year olds to pre-service teachers in university, and is an advocate for the unique circumstances of youth in her community.
Zev Moses is the director of the Museum of Jewish Montreal. A graduate of McGill University for his bachelor’s degree, Zev went on to complete his Masters in City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Inspired by Montreal’s diverse Jewish history, and responding to a lack of engagement opportunities for Jewish young adults, he founded the Museum of Jewish Montreal in 2010. The Museum recently moved into its newest building in the Mile-End district and is home to art exhibitions, cultural and social events, as well as walking tours and food tours that showcase Montreal’s Jewish heritage.
Janelle Lucyk is a leader among an emerging generation of Canadian artists specializing in old music and historically informed performance, taking ideas from conception to the stage.
Janelle is the artistic director of Ménestrel, her ensemble with Kerry Bursey which produces alternative early music mixing ancient repertoire with oral folk traditons. In 2022 and 2023, Ménestrel produced their “Messiah-on-the-go!” congregating twenty emerging performers from across Canada to perform Handel’s masterpiece in historic Nova Scotian venues. Janelle is director of the new series ArtChoral at La Grande Salle du 9e, the recently reopened historic Art Deco venue in Montreal. Following mentor and arts champion Barbara Butler, Janelle is Artistic and Administrative Director of Musique Royale (est. 1985), a music presenter based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia which enriches historic spaces through the sharing of world class early music, and much more. Last year included concerts in forty different historic venues across the spectacular maritime province.
2024 includes touring in most of the provinces and territories of Canada as a soloist representing ArtChoral’s multiyear project Coast-to-Coast-Coast. Through the summer Ménestrel was in residency in Europe for concerts, recording and outreach.
In fall 2022, Janelle was invited by legendary organist Xaver Varnus to perform at his two sold out performances in Hungary, including at the spectacular Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest. She has had the good fortune of working as a soloist with the Kings College Chapel Choir under five-time Grammy winner Paul Halley on many unforgettable concerts including Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and Selva Morale e Spirituale and multiple Bach Passions. Janelle graduated in 2014 with distinction from the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles in Belgium and completed her Masters in Management at Durham University in the UK where she was awarded the Best Soloist by Music Durham, and Best Female Soloist by her peers. While in Europe, she formed Voces Desuper, an ensemble performing regularly in the magnificent Cathédrale de Saints-Michel-et-Gudule, and especially at the Te Deum ceremony for the King and Queen of Belgium.
Leigh Kotsilidis is a poet and intermedia artist who creates experimental participatory installations, performance art, scientific studies, poetry, and stop-motion animations. Generally interested in scientific knowledge production and how we arrive at meaning in the face of a dominating discourse of uncertainty, Kotsilidis uses prevalent scientific theories as her starting point. Through reframing the familiar—whether via visual, written, or aural—Kotsilidis strives to level scientific knowledge systems for relatability and reinterpretation in order to provoke audiences to reflect on their own everyday entanglement and responsibility in scientific knowledge-building for creating more inclusive, non-hierarchical, and more-than-human understandings and relations. ?
Throughout Kotsilidis’s career, she has carried out several key projects at the intersection of literary and intermedia arts and science. She has written two books of poetry, Hypotheticals (Coach House Books, 2011) and Some of Us May Live (forthcoming); as well as created participatory installation and performance artworks, Lady Into Fox, Rare Birds, and Real Time, among others. She has also made work in collaboration with poet, Linda Besner; filmmaker, Carlos Ferrand; and media artists Amy Chartrand and, most recently, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Her solo and collaborative works have showcased at the Red Path Museum and Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal; SummerWorks and Canadian Stage in Toronto; HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) and Wilde Gallery in Basel, Switzerland; Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco; and at the Louvre in Paris.
Also passionate about community-building she creates, directs, and curates projects focused on shaping unique experiences that generate safe spaces for open dialogue and meaningful relations. Currently, these projects include General Audience and Rocket Science Room.
Kotsilidis lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. She holds an MFA from Concordia University in Studio Arts, Intermedia (2013), and a BA with Honours from York University in Anthropology and Creative Writing (2005).
Shimmon Hutchinson is a highly dedicated social worker and professor at Dawson College, where he teaches in the Social Service Department. He also runs a private practice, Montreal Integrated Therapy, on the Island of Montreal. With over 10 years of experience as a youth protection worker and in educational settings, Shimmon has built a deep passion for working with children, families, and couples throughout their lives.
Originally from Calgary, Shimmon moved to Ontario at a young age and grew up with a love for sports, music, and the performing arts. His journey toward social work started with a career in Culinary Management, but life steered him into Sales, where he found his passion for relationships and people. It was during his time in Montreal that he discovered his calling in the helping professions, leading him to complete a DEC in Social Service at Dawson College, a BSW at McGill, and most recently, a master’s in social work.
While studying at McGill, Shimmon actively participated in various projects and initiatives, such as the “Lived Experiences of Aging Immigrants: A narrative-photovoice study,” the student for a day program, the Social Work Students Association, and community programs like “Kings and Queens” with the EMSB. His outstanding work was recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Freda L. Paltiel Award, the Dr. Nico Trocmé Award for Social Work Excellence, Anne D. Fish Fellowship in Social Work, the J & M Harris Awards and a SSHRC award from his paper in which he explored the impact of Mentalization on Intimate Partner Violence.
Shimmon’s current practice focuses on working with children, families, couples, and individuals affected by intimate partner violence or conjugal violence. His therapeutic approach is grounded in the idea of corrective relational experiences, where the creation of a relational “us” is co-constructed with comfort, safety, and compassion. He believes that through this process, individuals can experience connection and healing, often for the first time. Shimmon describes his therapeutic work as an ongoing invitation to play and re-learn how to engage with others in healthy and supportive ways.
As he prepares to enter the Couple and Family Therapy program in Fall 2025, Shimmon remains committed to expanding his knowledge and continuing his impactful work in the field!
Holly Gauthier-Frankel is a multidisciplinary entertainment artist with over 35 years of experience in studio, film and stage performance. An award-winning theatre and voice actor, writer, teacher and burlesque dancer, she is also one of Montreal’s founding Neo-Burlesque and Vaudeville performers and instructors, celebrating her twentieth year in that milieu this year. With over twenty-five years of experience as a dancer, she has taught dance, choreographed, and has offered body-positivity and body-work seminars, theatre-craft classes and dance/creation workshops for a variety of different projects and live shows over the years. Holly is also well-known as a versatile, bilingual singer and voiceover artist, and has lent her voice to hundreds of dubbed tv shows, albums, films and video games. She is also a vocal coach specializing in diction, accents, accent-reduction, breath work, demo-creation and direction. She is thrilled to get to live and work as an artist in her hometown, Montreal, and so happy to get to share her story.
Nancy Etok, from Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik, represents the Ungava region on the Board of Pauktuutit. As the Vice-Principal of Ulluriaq School in her community, Nancy is passionate about empowering youth and fostering leadership rooted in Inuit values.
Gustavo Estrada was born in Guatemala and has lived in Montreal since 1993. Following his immigration to Canada, and the new experiences that came with it, he searched for a new way to express his creativity. He decided to experiment with jewelry making at the Visual Arts Centre of Montreal and discovered the creative potential in the transformation of metals despite their cold, stiff and seemingly unwieldy nature. Fascinated by the possibility of deliverance through the process of creation, he saw jewelry as a way to access a new world where tenacity and imagination leads to the creation of an object and the achievement of satisfaction and gratification. Large or small, the object always gives witness to the rich creative process through which it was born.
Thanks to his discovery, and removed from any commercial constraints, Gustavo Estrada rediscovers through each new piece the complete range of emotions that springs from creation, as well as the freedom one feels when fashioning an object. The pieces presented all reflect the three fundamental principles of design: form, volume and texture. Through the plasticity of metal and the exploration of techniques such as patina, copper on silver and repoussé, Gustavo Estrada succeeds in returning to the roots of the creative process.
Hey there! I’m Jonathan, an educator currently teaching at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. With a background in Outdoor Education and Health, I work with diverse populations of students, taking them out to the forest where we learn and connect with the places we visit. When I’m not working, I love traveling by bike and writing about creative learning approaches in nature.
Anwar is a social activist and community organizer. He holds a law degree from Italy and worked as a Criminal and Human rights lawyer for 13 years. He has a Master’s degree from McGill Social Work. He is a co-founder of Hagar- Bilingual School in the Negev. Since 2015 he has been working at Montreal City Mission as a Maan/Ensemble program coordinator and intercultural coordinator, MCM assistant director. In november 2020, Anwar was nominated as the Montrealer Of the Month by CBC.
Andreas Kessaris grew up in Montreal’s Park Extension district, the son of Greek immigrants. He is a graduate of Dawson College and Concordia University, where he earned a BA in Communications & English. His column, “Read On! with Andreas Kessaris” was a popular feature in the West-End community paper The Local Herald. His writing has also appeared on Suite101.com, in the literary journal The Write Place, on the Montreal entertainment website Curtainsup.tv, The Miramichi Reader, and in The Montreal Review of Books. His first book,The Butcher of Park Ex & Other Semi-Truthful Tales, was released in 2020 to great acclaim. For the last 17 years he has been Events Coordinator for Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore.
Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Lnu (Mi’kmaq) multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her poetry has been featured in print and online, anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and Anthologie de la poésie actuelle du femmes au Québec 2000-2020, and in the collections GIRTH and SCORPION SEASON. Her first work of nonfiction, NOTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Montreal, where she is finishing her first novel, writes on Substack, and is the host of the Indigenous Literatures Book Club at Drawn & Quarterly.
Substack: https://taramcgowanross.substack.com/
Montreal writer Linda Leith was born in Belfast and has lived in London, Basel, Paris, Ottawa, and Budapest. She has done a variety of literary jobs, initially as a scholar focused on Samuel Beckett and Mavis Gallant, science fiction and contemporary Quebec literature, and then as a writer herself as well as a French-English translator, editor, publisher, and organizer of groundbreaking literary events.
The author of eight titles that interweave the literary essay with memoir and fiction—including Marrying Hungary (2008), Writing in the Time of Nationalism (2010), and The Girl from Dream City: A Literary Life (2021)—she translated Louis Gauthier’s récit autobiographique Voyage en Irlande avec un parapluie in 2000, and her translation of Felicia Mihali’s novel La bigame is forthcoming in 2025.
Fiction editor at Véhicule Press (1989-95), she was publisher and editor of Matrix magazine (1988-95), and co-director of the bilingual literary show Write pour écrire in 1996. Founding Blue Metropolis Foundation in 1997, she worked as President & Artistic Director of the uniquely multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival until 2010. She launched Linda Leith Publishing | Linda Leith Éditions in 2011, the bilingual Salon .ll. in 2011, and Font magazine in 2021.
Awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Medal in 2012, she was named an officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to Canada in 2021.
Kaie Kellough is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. His long poem Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019), won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. His collection of short stories, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule Press, 2020) was nationally recognized. He is a vocalist for FYEAR, an avant-jazz nonet whose debut album was released in 2024 with Constellation Records.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a mixed-Arab writer, translator, and acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press living in Tio’tia:ke. Their book, Knot Body, published by Metatron Press in 2020, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was granted the honorary mention for poetry by the Arab American Book Awards, the Khayrallah Prize honorary mention, and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French was published in Spring 2023 and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they edited El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, published by Metonymy Press in 2024.
Organised by Metropolis bleu, the ‘’Planet my love’’ writing contest is open to apiring writers in Montreal. All you have to do is write a 1,500-word piece of literary fiction set against the backdrop of current climate issues. One $1,000 CDN scholarships will be awarded to the winning entry. The author of the winning entry will also be invited to read their work at the 28th Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, to be held in Montreal from April 23 to 26, 2026.
Entries will be judged according to the following criteria:
Each text submitted must be accompanied by your name, full contact details (postal address, e-mail address, telephone number), age, the name of the educational establishment you are attending and the program in which you are enrolled.
Deadline for submissions: January 4, 2026
Texts must be sent by e-mail to Isabel Cout: isabel.cout@metropolisbleu.org
Leah Marie Dorion is a Metis writer and artist currently living near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her artwork celebrates the strength and resilience of Indigenous women and families. Leah is also a published children’s book author and illustrator. Several of her Metis cultural books are available through Gabriel Dumont Press in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Strong Nations Publishing in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
Recently, Oscardo https://www.oscardo.com/collections/leah-dorion an online gift shop located in Toronto, Ontario began distributing products and fashions featuring her unique style of art works. Leah has a passion for early year’s education and is currently working with the Metis Nation of British Columbia (MNBC) to develop Metis cultural early years resources for children and families. She is a proud member of CARFAC which is the national voice of Canada’s professional visual artists. Visit www.leahdorion.ca for more information about her artistic practice.
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