CAra waterfall
Poet. Storyteller. Mentor.
I build gate-free literary futures — with language, lineage, and care.
Tides, tongues and translation shape my work — movement between languages, forms and belonging. I’m a poet and mother of three, building accessible literary spaces across languages and borders, often in the margins of the day, because gate-free futures are built in the small, stubborn hours of real life.
I write toward language, loss and home, and I teach writers how to sustain creative practices that honour their lived experience.
radiant wound
A lyrical exploration of grief, lineage and the intimate geography of home.
These poems map the fractures and inheritances we carry — and the light that insists on surviving them.
join the archipel community!
Where language meets lineage.
Where poets gather in the messy, luminous middle of the work.
Every week, I share interviews, essays, creative process notes, and behind-the-scenes dispatches from my life as a working poet.
join the next wave
THE DONALD E. WATERFALL SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Honouring my father’s legacy by supporting emerging poets.
The DEW Scholarship provides mentorship, editorial support, and financial resources for a writer each year — helping them build sustainable creative practices and wider visibility.
Each paid subscription & donation help sustain a poet’s year of growth, like our 2025-2026 DEW Scholar,
for writers
GROW YOUR PRACTICE
IMPRINT: 1-on-1 mentorships
Every voice leaves an imprint - let’s trace yours.
For poets — and anyone who writes like one. Page, stage, or in-between. For anyone who feels like they don’t belong. Multilingual or language-curious. Emerging, returning, or refining your next book. Translators, educators, editors, and interdisciplinary artists welcome.
A 1-on-1 creative mentorship to help you uncover your language, your lineage, and your own poetic frequency.
WORKSHOPS & TALKS
Make language your plaground.
Age-responsive, generative sessions for middle-schoolers through adults. Experiment with languages, translation as method & form as playground. Workshops become meeting points: between languages, between ages, between what you meant to say and what the poem teaches you to hear.
Here, discovery matters more than polish — the joy is in the making. Writers leave with pages that sound more like themselves — alive in the language(s) they love.