Wordfest & CAJ present Gabrielle Drolet & Brittney McNamara

Wordfest & CAJ present Gabrielle Drolet & Brittney McNamara

As legacy media struggles, the next generation of journalists is producing relevant, engaging, refreshingly fearless coverage. Wordfest is thrilled to be able to bring together two North American powerhouses disrupting the journalism landscape: Canadian editorial cartoonist and journalist, Gabrielle Drolet and Brittney McNamara, the features editor at Teen Vogue, which bills itself as “the young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world.” The lively and timely conversation includes an audience Q&A and book signing.

Drolet, author of the just published memoir Look Ma, No Hands, is the first woman to be nominated for a National Newspaper Award for Editorial Cartooning and an acclaimed essayist on disability issues. Teen Vogue’s extensively reported pieces and essays have garnered awards and the attention of otherwise disaffected readers, both young and old. “With smart, authentic takes on culture, identity, and politics, we tell the stories that normally go untold, defining the zeitgeist for a new generation that demands style and substance,” is the magazine’s answer to why readers should trust it. 

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists for helping to make this conversation possible. The 2025 CAJ National Conference takes place in Calgary May 30-31. Click here for more information.

About Gabrielle Drolet

Gabrielle Drolet is a journalist, essayist, and cartoonist based in Montreal. She regularly contributes cartoons to The New Yorker and The Globe and Mail and has been a guest panellist on CBC’s Commotion. This year, Drolet became the first woman to receive a National Newspaper Award nomination for Editorial Cartooning. See her portfolio here. Her written work has been published in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, VICE, Teen Vogue, and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Essays. Her essays on disability have been nominated for a Digital Publishing Award and won gold at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. Drolet holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. 

Website: gabrilledrolet.com
Instagram/Threads: @gabrielle.drolet

About Look Ma, No Hands

A humorous, profound debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood, by an acclaimed essayist and cartoonist.

In 2021, Gabrielle Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands. It only worsened over time, and as a writer and artist, she had to learn new ways of creating and expressing herself. The experience completely changed her life and her outlook. Look Ma, No Hands explores both the difficulty and the humour of developing chronic and life-altering pain in her twenties. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of her life touched by her disability: how she learned to write when she couldn’t type; how she learned to manage the most mundane daily tasks. She moves cities and as her work as a writer and cartoonist builds has to navigate different byzantine health systems without the privilege or security of having a family doctor, even as she moves into her new apartment and embarks on first dates. And she does all of this with the most wonderful sense of the absurd. Look Ma, No Hands is utterly charming and shares profound reflections on life’s curveballs, and explores how, in Drolet’s words, “you can live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body.

About Brittney McNamara

Brittney McNamara is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on health issues, including mental health, reproductive rights, sexual assault, and LGBTQ+ identity since 2014. In her current role as the features director at Teen Vogue, McNamara investigated the #MeToo movement on college campuses; reported on abortion access under the Trump administration; explored how incarceration impacts the mental health of young people; and published a series on various health issues, including teen Wegovy use and vaccination. In 2022, McNamara was awarded a Pulitzer Center grant for reporting on teen abortion access and Roe v. Wade. She was also a United Nations Press Fellow, chosen to report on the International Conference on Family Planning in Kigali, Rwanda in 2018. McNamara's work has been recognized by Physicians for Reproductive Health, the New England Newspaper and Press Association, GLAAD, and other professional organizations. Prior to Teen Vogue, McNamara was a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts, working across beats.

Instagram/Threads: @bmac0192
Bluesky: @teenvogue.com

Be Curiouser

• I have Chronic Pain. Why is Relief So Hard to Find? -Chatelaine
• Being a Writer was Central to My Identity. Then I was Forced to Write with My Voice. -The Globe and Mail
• High Speed Fail. -Maisonneuve
• Daily Cartoon on November 25. -The New Yorker
• Check out Teen Vogue’s Politics Features (covering Immigration, Environment, Justice, Government and History). -Teen Vogue
• Emboldened By a Trump Win, Misogynists Are Being Loud Online. -Teen Vogue
• The Labiaplasty Depiction on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Normalizes a Harmful Idea About Vulvas. -Teen Vogue
• Kim Kardashian’s Tiny Waist Corset at the 2024 Met Gala Looks Unreal and That’s the Problem. -Teen Vogue