“Sadly my entire residency will be online,” writes Catherine Hernandez, the University of Winnipeg’s Jake MacDonald Writer-In-Residence. “My good friend and renowned director from Winnipeg, Kimberley Rampersad once told me “I need you to have the real Winter-peg experience. I want you to visit in the dead of winter and see what makes the city so special.”
Hernandez is the author of Scarborough, an award-winning novel, quickly made into an award-winning movie about the city she grew up in and has been followed by three more novels and other works – her most recent the best-seller Behind You, about a young girl growing up in Scarbourough while a serial murderer was at large. She is also working on several TV and film projects, including The Unstoppable Jenny Garcia (CBC).
Hernandez is an author and screenwriter who has used social media to get the word out about her books, and says it played a large role in 2017 when she won her first (Jim Wong-Chu) award for her unpublished manuscript of Scarborough. “Besides drafting a solid manuscript, publishers are looking for authors they can bet their money on. They need to see authors who are willing to self-promote through their networks,” she writes.
Hernandez says she “was born a storyteller.”
“My mother was a pioneer of Filipinx folk education here in Canada and I grew up understanding that, as survivors of a diaspora, if we remembered our stories, we always had home in our hearts. That storytelling took the form of theatre, then books, and now television and film as well. Stories flow through me and I cannot ignore them. I am a conduit to the whispers of the universe and my ancestors. My job is to reach out and commit these stories to the page or screen.”
Although Garcia is doing the residency online, and must accept University of Winnipeg students first, community members may make a request to meet with her if time allows.
But “please,” she wrote to The Leaf, “someone invite me for something in person!” The Jake MacDonald Writer-in-Residence program runs until mid December.

Millenum Library’s 2025-26 Writer-in-Residence Ariel Gordon has experience in a wide variety of writing styles, and techniques to get writers writing, she says.
The longtime Wolseley resident has always been involved with journalism in Winnipeg in some aspect, (including currently working as a copy editor at the Winnipeg Free Press), has published award-winning books of poetry, helped to launch an annual poetry event with Plume Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Free Press, helped to create a woman’s anthology, and this month is launching her first Youth Sci-Fi novel Blood Letters, in a collaborative project with author and illustrator GMB Chomichuk. Once described as “the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry,” by writer Sylvia Legris, Gordon is adept at bringing the world in, and helping to discover how to get the words out.
One of her ode’s to trees began in a creative project in a weekend artist-in-residence project at the (former) Tallest Poppy restaurant on Sherbrook Street, where she sat under the branches of an Elm that gave shade to the outdoor seating area – and offered passers-by the opportunity to write something to the tree and hang it on its branches. She followed up by repeating the project two more times across the country to create Tree Talk, including a special hand-bound edition of the book with illustrator Natalie Baird.
Gordon will be offering writing workshops over the next few months, is hoping to create a writing circle, and will share the strategies she has used to build an audience.
“I never leave home without a notebook,” Gordon says. And those notebooks have sometimes sat on a shelf for a few years before being dug out again, she explains. “It’s not a foolproof system, but it works for me.” Another strategy she says that often surprises people is to simply sit in a location, put on a timer and “write everything you see… those details that you collect in those kinds of sessions are the kinds of things that make your writing more effective, more persuasive, more interesting.”
Gordon says becoming the Winnipeg Library’s Writer-in-Residence is something she has always wanted to be. “I’m here to help people when they when they need it.”
The Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library runs until April 30, 2026. Submissions may be dropped off at the library, by mail, or by email.