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 archipel on substack!
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,
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 playground.
I lead age-responsive, generative workshops for schools, festivals, community groups, and arts organizations.
We experiment with language, translation, hybridity, and the joyful mess of making.
These sessions become meeting points: between languages, between ages, between what you meant to say and what the poem teaches you to hear.
Writers leave with pages full of possibility — alive, curious and unmistakably their own.