A photograph of a Black biracial woman with a dark brown afro and brown eyes. She is sitting on a wooden chair, hands on her knees, facing the camera defiantly. She wears a sapphire suede blouse, wide-legged brown trousers, and brown cowboy boots.
Photography by Awa Banmana.
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 Winter Garden Theatre, the Harbourfront Centre, and the Goldfarb Gallery of York University. She has received performance training from Soulpepper Theatre, the Paprika Festival, the AMY Project, the Toronto Poetry Slam, and Our Bodies, Our Stories, a mentorship program for queer and trans artists of colour facilitated by Kama La Mackerel. 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 the winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry for “Selections from a fine African head”. She is a two-time nominee for the Irving Layton Award in Poetry from Concordia University, which she was awarded in 2020, and she was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word Award in 2024. Faith was the inaugural recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers, under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze, and 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.
Born in T’karonto/Toronto, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory, she writes in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka people.