2025 WGA Mentorship Program
Meet the Participants!
The WGA is thrilled to announce the participants for the 2025 Mentorship Program!
In January 2025, fourteen Alberta writers will begin their participation in the WGA’s annual mentorship program. 2025 marks the fourteenth year of the program, which pairs emerging writers with established Alberta authors to develop the emerging writer’s literary work, and also to provide support and encouragement. This program has seen many of its participants grow and succeed as published authors.
This year’s participants are:
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- Iheoma Joakin-Uzomba —matched with Derek Beaulieu
- Timiro Mohamed —matched with Amy LeBlanc
- Jessalyn LeBlanc (supported by the Sharon L. Henderson Fund for Young and Emerging Writers)—matched with Katie Bickell
- Natasha Chiam (supported by the Mary Bell Scholarship)—matched with Julie Sedivy
- Cheryl Nekolaichuk —matched with Marcello Di Cintio
- Shana Ross —matched with Kat Cameron
- Fran Plante —matched with paulo da costa
The mentorship program runs for four months. An in-person celebration of this program, complete with the emerging writers reading from their work, will be held in May.
Congratulations and good wishes to all the participants!
2025 Mentorship Participants
Click the tabs to read about this year’ participants!
Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence: Lectures and Writings, was published by Sweden’s Timglaset Editions, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, was published by Toronto’s Coach House Books. Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award’ and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University’s Chancellor’s Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of both Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Timiro Mohamed is a multidisciplinary artist and anti-racism educator inspired by the generations of storytellers before her. She is a visual artist, spoken word poet, and twice-published author who’s been featured as a columnist and poet in a handful of publications. As Edmonton’s former youth poet laureate and recipient of the ACGC Top 30 under 30 awards, she has performed across North America, competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and opened for Dr. Angela Davis and Yasin Bey. She’s passionate about the uses of art in community development, anti-racist education, and political advocacy, and looks to an Afro-futurist Black feminist praxis to inform her creative process and approach to systems change.
Amy LeBlanc is a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary and Managing Editor at Canthius. Amy’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know (Gordon Hill Press, 2020) was long listed for the 2021 ReLit Award and selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Amy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Room, Arc, The New Quarterly, Canadian Literature, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. Amy is a 2022 Killam Laureate, a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. Her next collection, I used to live here, is forthcoming with Porcupine’s Quill in spring 2025.
Jessalyn LeBlanc lives in Edmonton and works as an editor for Alberta King’s Printer. She recently graduated from the English Honours and Creative Writing program at MacEwan University. She is passionate about prairie fiction, and in her writing, explores topics close to her Métis heritage. She has been published in The Montreal Review and Coffin Bell Journal.
Katie Bickell is author of the novel Always Brave, Sometimes Kind, which won the Georges Bugnet Award, the Indie Author Award for Alberta, and was shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Best Novel. Her short stories have earned the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, the WGA’s Emerging Writer Award, and the Alberta Views Fiction Contest. Katie recently wrapped up her tenure as 2024 Regional Writer in Residence for Edmonton Metro Federation of Libraries, and when writing her own fiction, she teaches creative writing classes and works as a professional ghostwriter specializing in memoir.
Natasha Chiam is a freelance writer from Treaty 6 Territory. She writes creative non-fiction and narrative journalism, and her work had been published in The New York Times, Chatelaine, Edify, Xtra Magazine and Business Insider. In her writing she explores the intersections of motherhood, chronic disease, and feminism. She is working on a memoir essay collection and pens a weekly newsletter in her backyard writing shed where she muses on all things culture, politics, and surviving these so-called unprecedented times. She lives with her husband, two Gen Z teenagers, and one pandemic pup with velcro tendencies.
Julie Sedivy is a writer and linguist whose work straddles scientific and literary worlds. Her book Memory Speaks (Harvard University Press) was shortlisted for two Alberta Literary Awards and was named by The Economist as one of the top five books about language in a “golden age” of language writing. She has contributed writing to outlets such as Nautilus, Discover, Scienti
Cheryl Lynn Marie Nekolaichuk, PhD, R. Psych is a registered psychologist with a special interest in psycho-oncology and palliative care, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta. Throughout her career, she has incorporated writing as a source of meaning making, healing and self-reflection, while supporting patients and families through end-of-life transitions. Raised on the prairies, Cheryl has developed a deep appreciation for the natural, yet often unpredictable, rhythms of life. She attempts to capture these rhythmic cycles through her writing. She resides in Edmonton with her husband, Bill. Together, they share their love of nature and respect for the resiliency of the human spirit when confronted with life’s challenges.
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, both winners of the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Di Cintio’s writing has also appeared in publications such as The International New York Times, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary and the Palestine Writing workshop. His most recent book is Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers, and Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers will appear in 2025.
Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty 6 territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. After training as a playwright at Yale, Shana spent almost two decades authoring a reasonably stable life, building a career as an international expert in leadership and interpersonal dynamics before returning her attention to the page just in time for a global pandemic. Her literary poetry has recently appeared in Great Weather for MEDIA, Canthius, Ninth Letter, Yolk Magazine and more, and her speculative works have recently appeared in Augur, The Deadlands, The Fabulist, and MetaStellar, among others. She prefers walking in the woods to social media, and budgets her time accordingly (year round, since she bought a good coat). She lives in Eagle Ridge with her husband, son, three cats, and a remarkably hardy string of pearls plant. valley.
Kat Cameron (she/her) is a poet and short story writer. Her second collection of poetry, Ghosts Still Linger (University of Alberta Press), won a High Plains Book Award in 2021 and was a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her collection of short stories, The Eater of Dreams (Thistledown Press), was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award in 2020. She received an AFA literary arts grant in 2024. She lives in Edmonton and teaches creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.
Fran Plante is a gifted storyteller whose evocative writing explores the raw, poignant moments of her life. Known for her exceptional talent at weaving humour with heartbreak, Fran’s work resonates with readers who cherish the beauty unearthed in life’s messy moments. Faced with the unspeakable, Fran embraces vulnerability and captivates readers with her ability to write about life-changing experiences with integrity and humility. Transforming the mundane into magic comes naturally to Fran, whose greatest wish is to inspire those who read her work, and reinforce that success is always within reach, no matter the struggle.
paulo da costa Born in Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies (Moh’kins’tsis / Calgary, Alberta). He is thrice the recipient of the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction (2024, 2023 and 2020), the 2024 Outstanding Calgary Artist Award, as well as the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese.
Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood, a book of creative non-fiction, was published in 2024 with University of Regina Press.
Our Gratitude
Thank you to our donors and funders!
The WGA gratefully acknowledges the support of the RBC Foundation Emerging Artists Fund, Mary Bell Memorial Fund, Sharon L. Henderson Endowment for Young and Emerging Writers, John Patrick Gillese Fund, and W.O. Mitchell Scholarship Fund
