Hi, I’m Cara.

A poet, storyteller and mentor who helps writers sustain creative practices that honour their lived experience and move toward a more gate-free literary future.

My work moves through tides, tongues, and translation: the ways language carries memory, grief, inheritance, and possibility. I live between languages — English, French, and Nouchi — writing into the spaces where belonging fractures and reforms. Writers like Paisley Rekdal, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Claudia Rankine and Airea D. Matthews showed me that hybrid poetics could be both a form of rebellion and a site of radical care; their work opened a door I’ve been walking through ever since.

I was born in Ottawa, a city with two official languages, which might explain my interest in the French language and Francophone culture. I also inherited my family’s history of movement. Most recently, I moved from a dairy farm in Costa Rica — inhabited by a dozen dogs, chickens and the occasional tarantula — to Côte d’Ivoire for the third time.

I write toward language, loss, and the places we call home — and I teach writers how to cultivate creative practices that honor their lived experience.

My debut poetry collection, Radiant Wound explores grief and ecological memory. My current projects braid hybrid language, myth and postcolonial lineage, tracing the ways identity and language are shaped by movement, migration and the stories we inherit. I look closely at what survives translation — and what is transformed by it.

Alongside my own writing, I mentor emerging poets, helping them build creative practices that honor lived experience rather than institutional permission. My teaching is rooted in clarity, care, and community — tools, not rules — and in the belief that writers deserve access to spaces that support their voice and visions.

This belief shapes The CounterFeed™, a gate-free literary ecosystem dedicated to hybrid poetics, non-canonical knowledge, and West African literary lineages. It’s an archipelago of resources and possibility — a community space for writers who work at thresholds, borders and crossings.

I also founded the DEW Fund in honor of my father, Donald E. Waterfall — diplomat, linguist and advocate for cross-cultural dialogue — to support emerging poets across borders.

At the heart of everything I do is a belief that gate-free futures are built in the small, stubborn hours of real life — in conversations with writers, in the margins between responsibilities, in the shared work of imagining something more generous than what we were given.

This is where I live, and where I invite others to join me.