A Black biracial woman with auburn curls and brown eyes has a hand casually resting on her neck and beams directly at the camera. She is framed from the waist up and is wearing a green sleeveless dress, magenta geometric earrings, and blue statement eyeliner.
Photography by Kathleen Charles.
A storyteller of Afro-Guyanese ancestry, Faith Paré writes poetry, performance, and criticism.
Her work explores the nature of pain, cultural displacement in a polarized world, and futurisms in the face of destruction, all in dialogue with multitudinous traditions of Black cultural production.
Faith has shared her poetry at national arts centres such as the Art Gallery of York University, the Harbourfront Centre, and the Winter Garden Theatre. From 2021 to 2023 she was curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, one of Montreal’s longest-running English-language reading series, showcasing a national platform of writers.
Faith is a two-time nominee of the Irving Layton Award in Poetry from Concordia University, which she was awarded in 2020. She received the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s inaugural Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers, under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze. She was also named an honourable mention for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pavlick Prize, granted to a poet with an outstanding portfolio and significant commitment to Canadian poetry communities.
An emerging performance-maker, Faith is an alum of Our Bodies, Our Stories, a creation and mentorship program for artists who are queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, facilitated by Kama La Mackerel. She has also participated in the Young Playwrights’ Unit with Tarragon Theatre and Scarborough Arts, the Paprika Festival, and the AMY Project. Her first one-act play, Immaculate Contraception, was awarded the Colin Krivy Award for Playwriting in the 2018 McGill Drama Festival.
Born in T’karonto/Toronto, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory, she was raised in the proudly working class and immigrant community of Scarborough. She now writes, learns, and wanders in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka people.