Maureen Medved

Maureen Medved’s novel The Tracey Fragments was published by House of Anansi Press. Over the years, Maureen’s writing as well as adaptations of her work have been published in literary journals, magazines and produced for stage and screen. Maureen’s screen adaptation of The Tracey Fragments opened the Panorama program of the 57th annual Berlin International Film Festival and won the Manfred Salzgeber Prize, selected by jury for a film “that broadens the boundaries of cinema today.” The film has gone on to feature at a number of international film festivals, screened at MOMA and has also garnered other nominations and awards, including a Genie Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay.

In 2008 a French language version of her book won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, awarded to C& L Chabalier. She also designed a course in writing for new media for the Creative Writing Program, and, as part of her research, currently explores creative writing opportunities in new media. In 2009, she received the Artistic Achievement Award from Women in Film and Television (Vancouver). Her novel Black Star came out in April 2018 with Anvil and won the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award. She is a film reviewer and an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. Maureen is currently completing her third novel, a book of creative non-fiction as well as other projects for film.

http://creativewriting.ubc.ca/program-information/faculty-staff/maureen-medved/

Linda Svendsen

Linda’s novel, Sussex Drive, was published by Random House Canada in 2012 and was a CBC Bookie Awards nominee in the comedy category. Linda’s story collection, Marine Life, was published in Canada (HarperCollinsCanada), the U.S. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Germany (Residenz Verlag), and was made into a feature film. As well, it was an LA Times First Book Award nominee. Her stories have appeared in Seventeen, Room, The Atlantic, Saturday Night, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, Fiddlehead, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies such as The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories, I Know Some Things: Stories About Childhood by Contemporary Writers, edited by Lorrie Moore, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8th Edition. Linda graduated with her MFA from Columbia University, held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, and received two National Endowment of the Arts Awards.

Television

Linda recently received CMF funding ($20,000) to develop Lunch, a half-hour dramedy series. She also created a one-hour pilot script for a limited crime series. She co-produced and co-wrote Human Cargo, CBC’s six-hour dramatic limited series about the impact of war and globalization upon refugees, which shot in Vancouver and South Africa. The series garnered the 2004 Peabody Award, the Robert Wagner Narrative Screenwriting Award from the Columbus International Film and Television Festival, as well as seven Geminis. It was invited to the Rencontres Internationales de Télévision in Reims, France, and sold to 82 countries. Other long-form writing credits include Murder Unveiled (with Brian McKeown), At The End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story, and The Diviners, adapted from the Margaret Laurence novel. She has written episodes for Airwaves and These Arms of Mine. In 2006, she received the John Simon Guggenheim Award.

http://www.lindasvendsen.ca/

Keith Maillard

Keith Maillard is the author of fourteen novels, a book of poetry, and a memoir. Twelve of his titles have been shortlisted for or won literary prizes. Light in the Company of Women was a runner-up for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; Motet won that prize. Hazard Zones was short-listed for the Commonwealth Literary Prize and Gloria was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Dementia Americana won the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. Of his quartet, Difficulty at the Beginning, the first three volumes – Running, Morgantown, and Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes– were shortlisted for the Weatherford Award while the quartet’s final book, Looking Good, was longlisted for the Relit Award. Most recently, his novel Twin Studies was awarded the 2019 Alberta Book of the Year Award in the fiction category.

Maillard’s nonfiction essays and articles have been published in newspapers, journals, and anthologies throughout his long career. In 2018 he contributed to Refuse: Canlit in Ruins, edited by Julie Rak, Hannah McGregor, and Erin Wunker. In 2019, he published his first creative nonfiction book, Fatherless: A Memoir.

http://www.keithmaillard.com/

Nancy Lee

Nancy Lee is the award-winning author of two works of fiction, Dead Girls and The Age, and a poetry collection, What Hurts Going Down (McClelland & Stewart, 2020). Her books have been published in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, and her work most recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Adroit Journal, The Puritan and Arc Poetry Magazine. Nancy has served as Writer-in-Residence for Historic Joy Kogawa House, the city of Richmond, and the city of Vincennes, France. Together with Annabel Lyon, Nancy is co-creator of the internationally acclaimed EdX education series, How to Write a Novel.

http://www.nancyleeauthor.com

Annabel Lyon

Annabel Lyon published her first book, Oxygen, a collection of stories, in 2000. The Best Thing for You, a collection of three novellas, followed in 2004. She has written two books for children, All Season Edie (2009) and Encore Edie (2010).

Her first novel, The Golden Mean, was published in 2009 and won the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Sweet Girl, a companion to The Golden Mean, was published in fall 2012. Imagining Ancient Women, the text of her Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, was published the same year. She won the Engel-Findley award for a body of work in 2015. Her latest novel, Consent, was published in fall 2020.

http://creativewriting.ubc.ca/program-information/faculty-staff/annabel-lyon/

Timothy Taylor

Timothy Taylor is a bestselling and award winning author of six book-length works of fiction and nonfiction. He emerged on the writing scene in 2000, when three of his short stories were selected for a single edition of the Journey Prize Anthology. His story Doves of Townsend won the Journey Prize that same year and was included in his collection of short fiction Silent Cruise, which was itself later named runner-up to the Danuta Gleed Award. Taylor’s first novel Stanley Park was released to critical acclaim in 2001 and was nominated for a Giller Prize, a Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize as well as both a Vancouver and BC Book Award. His 2011 novel, The Blue Light Project, was a bestseller in Canada and went on to win the CBC Bookie Prize in fiction. His most recent novel is The Rule of Stephens and was released in 2017.

Taylor has also been a prolific journalist and creative nonfiction writer over this same period. He has published hundreds of feature articles in the past 15 years in such publications as The New York Times, EnRoute, Walrus, 18 Bridges, The Report on Business Magazine, Hakai and many others. He has won or been nominated for over two dozen magazine awards, been widely anthologized, and seen his work appear in both the US and France. His most recent nonfiction book, published by Nonvella in Vancouver, is Foodville, a food memoire and meditation on foodie obsessions in western consumer culture. In addition to his writing and teaching at UBC, Taylor travels widely, having in recent years spent time on assignment in China, Tibet, Japan, Dubai, Brazil, the Canadian arctic and other places. He lives in Point Grey Vancouver with his wife, his son, and a Brittany Spaniel named Keaton.

http://www.timothytaylor.ca/

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta and has been both a Rhodes Scholar and a PE Trudeau Foundation Scholar. He is the author of This Wound is a World (Frontenac House 2017), winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (House of Anansi Press 2019), longlisted for Canada Reads 2020, and A History of My Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton 2020), finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

https://billy-raybelcourt.com

Emily Pohl-Weary

Emily is the author of three novels, two collections of poetry, a biography, a series of girl pirate comics, and a podcast drama script. Her most recent books are the young adult novel Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl and the poetry collection Ghost Sick.

She has worked in many different positions within the publishing industry, having edited novels, curated an anthology about female superheroes, published feminist literary magazine Kiss Machine, and been the acquisitions editor for a line of high school English textbooks.

Emily holds a PhD in Adult Education and Community Development from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Prior to joining UBC Creative Writing, she facilitated long-running creative writing workshops in community settings.

http://emilypohlweary.com/

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and spent the first 16 years of her life in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and the US before her family moved to Canada. She writes science fiction and fantasy, exploring their potential for centering non-normative voices and experiences. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1998. She has published six novels and numerous short stories. Her writing has received the John W. Campbell Award, Locus Magazine’s Best First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton (Nebula) Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the Inkpot Award, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award, and Canada’s Prix/Aurora Award. From 2018 to 2020, she was the lead writer of “House of Whispers” (co-writer Dan Watters), a series of comics published by DC Comics and set in the universe of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman.” She has received honorary Dr of Letters degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Hopkinson has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshops in San Diego, California and Seattle, Washington. She was the editor of the fiction anthologies Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Whispers From the Cotton-Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. She was co-editor of So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (with Uppinder Mehan), Particulates (with Rita McBride), Tesseracts 9 (with Geoff Ryman), and the fiction editor (with Kristine Ong Muslim) of “People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction,” a special issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” In 2021 the Science Fiction Writers of America honoured her with the Damon Knight Memorial “Grand Master” Award, recognizing her lifetime of achievements in writing, mentorship and teaching. In 37 years she was the youngest person to receive the award, and the first woman of African descent.

http://nalohopkinson.com

Alix Ohlin

Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, most recently the novel Dual Citizens and the story collection We Want What We Want (2021). She has been a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, among others, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Walrus, The New York Times, Lithub, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts.

http://www.alixohlin.com

Sarah Leavitt

Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and educator whose particular areas of interest include autobiographical comics, formal experimentation in comics, and comics pedagogy – developing strategies for teaching comics creation as well as exploring how comics creation shapes students’ work in other forms of writing.

Sarah’s first book, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), was published in Canada and internationally, and translated into French, German and Korean. Tangles was the first comic to be nominated for a Writers’ Trust Award, and has become a widely-studied work in the growing field of comics and medicine. A feature-length animation of Tangles is in development with Giant Ant animation studio and a major American production company.

Sarah’s second book, Agnes, Murderess, was published in Canada in September 2019, and won a Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature (fiction) and an Alberta Book Publishers Award (speculative fiction). Agnes was a finalist for both Canadian comics prizes, the Doug Wright Awards and Joe Shuster Awards. Sarah has also published short comics in magazines and anthologies, as well as self-publishing her work in printed zines and online.

Her current work-in-progress is a collection of short, experimental comics about her partner’s death in 2020.

Sarah has been developing and teaching comics classes in the UBC School of Creative Writing since 2012. She is also an instructor in the new Biomedical Visualization and Communication Certificate, a collaboration between the UBC Faculty of Medicine Hackspace for Innovation and Visualization in Education (HIVE) and the Centre for Digital Media.

Sharon McGowan

Sharon McGowan’s most recent film is the hour-long documentary Bearded Ladies: the Photography of Rosamond Norbury, which premiered at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival in 2015. This film was also produced by Peggy Thompson, the co-producer and writer of Better than Chocolate.

THE OLDEST BASKETBALL TEAM IN THE WORLD, which she directed and produced for Chum TV, follows the “Retreads”, women with an average age of 72 as they prepare to compete at the intimidating World Masters Games. The New York Times described the film as “compassionate, heartfelt and inspirational.”

Sharon McGowan is also known for producing the feature film box office hit BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and was released in the US where it played on over 300 screens.

McGowan produced the feature films THE LOTUS EATERS, which won three Genie Awards including Best Screenplay and SAINT MONICA, which had its international premiere at the Kinderfest Section of the Berlin Film Festival and won the Cultural Expressions Award – Best Narrative Feature at the 2003 Sarasota Film Festival. She served as consulting producer on three independent feature films: Gary Burns’ A PROBLEM WITH FEAR and WAYDOWNTOWN and Bruce Spangler’s PROTECTION.

She received the Woman of the Year Award from Vancouver Women in Film and Video in 1999 and is also an Honorary Lifetime Member of that organization. She has an MFA in Film Studies from UBC.

Bronwen Tate

Bronwen Tate is the author of the poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore (Inlandia Institute 2021), National Winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Midwinter Constellation, a poetry collaboration, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Bronwen earned an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her poems and essays have appeared in publications including CV2, Bennington Review, The Rumpus and Contemporary Literature. After completing a Postdoc as a Thinking Matters Fellow at Stanford, Bronwen taught creative writing and literature at Marlboro College in Vermont before coming to UBC. Her work has been supported by Stanford’s DARE (Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence) Dissertation Fellowship, as well as by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and Vermont Studio Center.

https://www.bronwentate.com/

John Vigna

John Vigna’s novel, No Man’s Land, was published in Fall 2021. His first book of fiction, Bull Head, was received with critical acclaim in Canada and the US in 2012 and published in France by Éditions Albin Michel in 2017. It was selected by Quill & Quire as an editor’s pick of the year and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. John was named one of 10 writers to watch by CBC Books

Anosh Irani

Anosh Irani is a three-time Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author and playwright, and a two-time winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. His novel, The Parcel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, National Post, CBC Books and The Walrus.

https://anoshirani.com/

Frances Koncan

Frances Koncan is an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright and theatre artist from Couchiching First Nation. They hold an MFA in Playwriting from the City University of New York Brooklyn College.

Productions of their work include Women of the Fur Trade (2023) at the Stratford Festival directed by Yvette Nolan, Women of the Fur Trade (2024) at the National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre/Great Canadian Theatre Company directed by Renae Morriseau, Space Girl (2023) at Prairie Theatre Exchange directed by Krista Jackson, The Crows (2023) at Gwaandak Theatre directed by Miki Wolf, and Women of the Fur Trade (2020) at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre directed by Audrey Dwyer. Other plays include Don’t Go Into the Woods, Riot Resist Revolt Repeat, How to Talk to Human Beings, and zahgidiwin/love.

They were the Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library (2022-2023) and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Manitoba (2021-2022), as well as journalist at the Winnipeg Free Press (2019-2021).

Cecily Nicholson

Cecily Nicholson is the author of four books and past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2015) and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry (2018). She is the first honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society (2023) and 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley.