Fiona Raye Clarke
WRITER/MENTEE
Fiona Raye Clarke is an award-winning Trinidadian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist. She facilitated mural art workshops for young men in prison in Estelí, Nicaragua during a service-learning placement at FUNARTE, creative writing workshops funded by the Toronto Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Foundation, and the City of Toronto at the Parkdale Library, Maria A. Shchuka Library, Parkdale Project Read, the 519, the UTSC Women’s & Trans Centre, East End Arts, and the Grand Valley Institution for Women, and theatre workshops at Jumblies Theatre, Community Arts Guild, and Hart House. She is the editor of Basodee: An Anthology Dedicated to Black Youth (2012), The Black Church in Canada (2015), and Black Like We: Troubleshooting the Black Youth Experience (2018) which was the winner of the ArtReach Youth Arts Pitch Contest.
She has received support for her fiction and playwriting from the Ontario Arts Council. Her plays have appeared in various publications and on stage at the InspiraTO Festival and b current’s rock.paper.sistahz festival, and her writing has been published in Broken Pencil Magazine, The Peak Magazine, alt.theatre, Plath Poetry Project, The Puritan Town Crier blog, Room Magazine blog, Shameless Magazine blog, and the League of Canadian Poets Chapbook Series: These Lands: A Collection of Voices by Black Poets edited by Chelene Knight.
Fiona is a certified Amherst Writers & Artists Method creative writing facilitator and a graduate of the Nia Centre for the Arts Art of Facilitation Program and Jumblies Theatre’s community-engaged arts intensive Artfare Essentials. She is the Artistic Director of INTERGENERACIAL, a Black youth oral history theatre program she founded in 2015, and was the winner of the CaribbeanTales CineFAM Short Film Challenge for her short film “Intersecting” which premiered at the 2017 CaribbeanTales International Film Festival and screened at the San Francisco Queer National Arts Festival. She was a Diaspora Dialogues 2018 Long Form Mentorship Program mentee, a 2018 Firefly Creative Studio Writer-in-Residence, and an alumnus of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets. She holds a Mast of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School, a Creative Writing Certificate from Humber College, and is currently completing a Creative Writing Certificate at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.
Fiona was a Diaspora Dialogues 2018 Long Form Mentorship Program mentee and worked with Farzana Doctor.
Fiona is a DD-TD Black Playwrights Mentoring Program playwright and partnered with Donna Michelle St. Bernard and New Harlem Productions to dramaturge her play Broken Windows.