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Congratulations to Kevin Spenst, MFA Alumnus and first place winner in the poetry category for the Lush Triumphant Literary Award.
Lush Triumphant Literary Award
Congratulations to BFA alumnus Lucas J. W. Johnson, whose story was recently published in Speaking Out: LGBTQ Youth Stand Up anthology edited by Steve Berman.
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Vancouver Queer Film Festival
Elena E. Johnson (MFA 2009) was one of three finalists for the 2011 Alfred G. Bailey Prize. The Bailey Prize is awarded annually for the best yet-to-be-published poetry manuscript. She was also a finalist for this year's CBC Literary Awards.
Wade Kinley, a joint first year MFA student in CrWr and Theatre, has received an internship with the Lark Play Development Center in New York City.
Creative Writing Alumna, Josie Mitchell recently won a cash prize for third place in the Vancouver Cultural Centre's Young Playwrights Competition for her one-act play.
The Creative Writing Program welcomes Steven Galloway as an Assistant Professor to its prestigious Faculty Roster.
Congratulations to current MFA Creative Writing student, Kevin Spenst. Kevin has been shortlisted for the The Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. The prize is awarded annually to the best poetry manuscript by an emerging Canadian writer.
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Creative Writing current students and alumni comprised five of the ten finalists in the EVENT 2010 Creative Nonfiction competition. Congratulations to winner, Chris Urquhart!
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Congratulations MFA student, Jordan Hall! Jordan Hall is the winner of the Samuel French 2010 Canadian Playwrights contest for her play, Kayak.
MFA Creative Writing Alumni to be published in Coming Attractions 10, edited by Mark Anthony Jarman.
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Creative Writing MFA student Kaitlin Fontana has been chosen by Evelyn Lau to share her Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award.
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When Random House received Creative Writing MFA Alumna, Carol Shaben's thesis manuscript, they didn't wait long to acquire it.
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Creative Writing Optional Residency MFA Alumna, Sarah Selecky's short-story collection This Cake is For the Party, has been long-listed for this year's Giller Prize.
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Creative Writing Optional Residency MFA, Krista Foss featured in the National Post for Journey Prize Questionnaire.
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Creative Writing BFA alumni, Paolo Javier, named Poet Laureate of NYC's Queen.
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Creative Writing MFA Alumni and students, Andrew Clark, Oliver Kellhammer, Alex Leslie and Mitch Miyagawa received honorable mentions at the National Magazine Awards.
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Congratulations to Creative Writing MFA Alumnus, Dave Deveau, who received the 2010 Gordon Armstrong Playwright's Rent Award.
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Creative Writing MFA Alumna, Susan Olding, received the Reader's Choice Award at the Creative Non-Fiction Collective ceremony at the Banff Centre on April 24th, 2010 for her essays from Pathologies.
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Creative Writing Student, Nicola Campbell made the 2009 USBBY Outstanding International Books list for her Children's book Shin-Chi's Canoe.
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BFA Creative Writing Major, Karina Melendez's poem, The Sound was Editors' Choice in Arc Poetry Magazine's 14 Annual Poem of the Year Contest and published in Arc 63: Winter 2010.
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Creative Writing congratulates MFA Creative Writing Alumna Melanie Little on her new position at House of Anansi Press as Senior Editor of Canadian Fiction.
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Current MFA, Rebekah Lopata's play What if I Don't will be presented at the third annual award-winning EBE Ensemble, festival of new one act plays in New York.
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Creative Writing students dominate the StudentWrites! Playwriting Competition 2009. Gillian Bennett took home first prize in the competition for her play 'Sick or Swim', while Brie Wittman and Shannon Campbell took home the second and third prize.
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MFA Creative Writing alumna, Elena Johnson, makes the shortlist for the Malahat Open Season Awards and the ARC Poem of the Year Contest.
Creative Writing Optional Residency MFA Student, Daniel Griffin, is a 2009 Finalist for the Journey Prize"
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Producer Michael Parker plans to use Comic Con award scholarship to obtain a Masters of Fine Arts in Film Production and Creative Writing degree at UBC.
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Creative Writing Arnold and Nancy Cliff Writer in Residence: Steven Galloway.
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Kazat Poet in Residence at the Historic Joy KogawaHouse: 21 year old Akerke Mussabekova is a third-year student in the translation department at al-Farabi Kazakh National University, the country's largest and premier university, situated in Almaty. She is being hosted by Historic Joy Kogawa House and funded by the HSBC Poet in the City cultural exchange program.
UBC's Creative Writing Program is sad to note the passing of poet and MFA Creative Writing alumna Kuldip Gill on Sunday, May 10, 2009. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies such as In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets.
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UBC MFA in Creative Writing alumni Robert Paul Weston’s book, Zorgamazoo, named one of the Top 10 First Novels for Youth: 2008.
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visit the Zorgamazoo web site.
After a successful launch this past fall, the UBC Alumni Book Club is back for 2009.
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Creative Writing MFA Alumna, Clea Young was recently nominated for the $10,000 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story Chaperone, published in Grain Magazine. This prize recognizes excellence in an emerging writer who has published a short story from an in-progress novel in a Canadian literary journal.
More on the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize>
Creative Writing MFA alumnus, Lee Henderson, received a nomination for the 2008 Writers’ Trust Awards for his novel The Man Game. Henderson, who will be competing with award winning authors for this $25,000 fiction prize won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for The Broken Record Technique.
More on the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize>
Short story, “The Riot and a Girl” written by University of British Columbia MFA Creative Writing alumna Tsering Lama, was nominated by the Malahat Review to be published in The Journey Prize Stories 20, an anthology that showcases the best of Canada’s new writers.
Click here for more information on the Journey Prize>
Former Creative Writing Writer in Residence, Miriam Toews receives a nomination for the 2008 Writers’ Trust Awards for her novel The Flying Troutmans. Towes, who will be competing with award winning authors for this $25,000 fiction prize won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2004 for her novel A Complicated Kindness.
More on the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize>
Elena E. Johnson, MFA Creative Writing student, celebrates as her poem is published in the anthology Rocksalt – Contemporary Poets of British Columbia as well as an honorable mention in THIS magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt (2008).
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UBC's Creative Writing Program is sad to note the passing of Ted Rogers, President and CEO of Rogers Communications, a company that has supported our work in Creative Writing.
Creative Writing Instructor, Deborah Campbell takes gold at the 33rd Annual National Magazine Awards.
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Our summer residencies include numerous panels and instructor talks. Recordings of many of these events are freely available here for downloading in mp3 format under a Creative Commons license. 'Right click' on PCs or on Macs 'option click' to save the file to your local machine.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Canada License.
| 2011 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Monday July 4th | |
| "Life after the MFA" - Andrew Gray (mod). Cathryn Morris, Mette Bach, Rachel Sa, Vivian Hansen. |  panel (31.5 MB MP3) |
| "Nonfiction and Truth" - Wayne Grady (mod), Gary Geddes, Aislinn Hunter, Deborah Campbell. |
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| Tuesday July 5th | |
| "Beginnings, Middles & Endings" - Zsuzsi Gartner (mod), Wayne Grady, Annabel Lyon, Joseph Boyden, Brian Brett, Susan Musgrave. | panel (32 MB MP3) |
| Faculty Reading Night: Annabel Lyon, Susan Musgrave, Joseph Boyden, Wayne Grady, Zsuzsi Gartner, Sara Graefe, Brian Brett. | reading (32 MB MP3) |
| Wednesday July 6th | |
| "Ethics of Fiction" - Annabel Lyon, Zsuzsi Gartner, Rhea Tregebov, Joseph Boyden. | panel (30 MB MP3) |
| Friday July 8th | |
| "Making Money" - Nancy Lee, Miranda Pearson, Kevin Chong, Kathy Page, John Vigna. | panel (30 MB MP3) |
| Saturday July 9th | |
| "Emotional Life of the Writer" - Susan Musgrave, Brian Brett, Angela Long, Sara Graefe. | panel (29 MB MP3) |
| Monday July 11th | |
| "After the Script Sells" - Sara Graefe, Martin Kinch, Mark Leiren-Young, Maureen Medved, Deb Peraya. | panel (40 MB MP3) |
| 2010 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Tuesday July 6th | |
| Faculty Reading: All Faculty. | reading (17 MB MP3) |
| Technical problems prevented us from recording the 2010 panels. The 2011 panels will be uploaded in late summer 2011. | |
| 2009 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Monday July 6th | |
| "Writing and Parenting" - Mod. Sara Graefe, Cori Howard, Deborah Williams, Peter Levitt, Susan Musgrave. | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 7th | |
| "Writing Life Panel: Getting it out in the world." Mod. Susan Musgrave, Susan Juby, Peter Levitt, Jacqueline Windh. | panel (37 MB MP3) |
| Wednesday July 8th | |
| "Cult of the Sentence." Mod. Zsuzsi Gartner, Lee Henderson, Lisa Moore, Charlotte Gill. | panel (32 MB MP3) |
| Thursday July 9th | |
| "Fear of Plot, Embracing Plot." Mod. Catherine Bush, Lisa Moore, Sara Graefe, Steven Galloway. | panel (33 MB MP3) |
| Friday July 10th | |
| "Changing Technologies." Mod. Andrew Gray, Julie Morris, Jennica Harper, Thad McIlroy | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Saturday July 11th | |
| "Writer/Editor relationship across genres." Mod. Zsuzsi Gartner, Annabel Lyon, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Ian Weir, Danielle Egan. | panel (35 MB MP3) |
| Monday July 13th | |
| "Writing the Tricky Bits." Mod. Sioux Browning, Brian Brett, Kevin Chong. | panel (38 MB MP3) |
| Faculty Readings | |
| Luanne Armstrong | reading (5 MB MP3) |
| Sioux Browning | reading (3.5 MB MP3) |
| Catherine Bush | reading (2.3 MB MP3) |
| Maggie de Vries | reading (3.1 MB MP3) |
| Zsuzsi Gartner | reading (4.1 MB MP3) |
| Wayne Grady | reading (4.3 MB MP3) |
| Sara Graefe | reading (3.7 MB MP3) |
| Peter Levitt | reading (3.4 MB MP3) |
| Annabel Lyon | reading (1.8 MB MP3) |
| Lisa Moore | reading (2.1 MB MP3) |
| Susan Musgrave | reading (4.6 MB MP3) |
| 2008 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Monday July 7th | |
| "Writing Inc." - Mod. Sioux Browning, Peggy Thompson, Billeh Nickerson, Mindy Abramowitz, Rowena List, Susan Musgrave. | panel (68 MB MP3) |
| Monday July 7th | |
| "Literary Machines: The Writer & The Cybersphere" – Mod. Zsuzsi Gartner, Neil Every, Gisele Baxter, Oliver Kellhammer. | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 8th | |
| "Genre Writing" - Mod Brian Brett, John Gray, Eileen Kernaghan, Ann Marie Fleming. | panel (36 MB MP3) |
| Wednesday July 9th | |
| "YA or Adult Novel: How can we tell?" Mod Glen Huser, Meg Tilly, Gayle Friesen, Steven Galloway. | panel (35 MB MP3) |
| Thursday July 10th | |
| "To Flashback or not to Flashback" - Mod Catherine Bush, David Chariandy, Susan Musgrave, Sara Graefe. | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Saturday July 11th | |
| "Manipulation of Imagery" - Mod Sara Graefe, Peter Levitt, Sioux Browning, Kendra Fanconi, Keith Maillard. | panel (33 MB MP3) |
| Monday July 13th | |
| "Ethics of Craft in Nonfiction", Mod Luanne Armstrong, Wayne Grady, Jane Silcott. | panel (44 MB MP3) |
| "The Pitches", Mod Zsuzsi Gartner, Chris Labonte, Gary Ross, John Dippong. | panel (33 MB MP3) |
| 2007 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Monday July 2nd | |
| Panel - "Teaching Writing" Alison Acheson, Mod. Genni Gunn, Kara Stanley, Peter Levitt. | panel (52 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 3rd | |
| Panel - "Copyright & Intellectual Property" – Brian Brett, Mod., Michael Geist, Mira Sundara Rajan, Paul Whitney. | panel (36 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 3rd | |
| Panel - "Copyright & Intellectual Property" – Brian Brett, Mod., Michael Geist, Mira Sundara Rajan, Paul Whitney. | panel (36 MB MP3) |
| Wednesday July 4th | |
| Panel - "Switch Hitting/Literary Crossdressing - Poets who transition into and out of other forms" – Susan Musgrave, Mod., Brian Brett, Sioux Browning. | panel (27 MB MP3) |
| Thursday July 5th | |
| Panel - "Collaboration in stage and screen" – Sara Graefe, Mod., Jennica Harper, Kathleen Oliver, Sioux Browning. | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Friday July 6th | |
| Panel - “Make it New?” Cliches, Tropes & Originality in a Crowded Century – Zsuzsi Gartner, Mod., Catherine Bush, Lee Henderson, Caroline Adderson, Jennica Harper. | panel (42 MB MP3) |
| Saturday July 7th | |
| Panel: "Beginnings & Endings" – Catherine Bush, Mod., Caroline Adderson, Timothy Taylor, Shaena Lambert. | panel (34 MB MP3) |
| Panel: "Launching yourself into the world" – Nancy Lee, Mod., Tara Gereaux, Steven Galloway, Andrea MacPherson-Donnery, Joe Wiebe. | panel (32 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 10th | |
| Panel:"Subtext" – Sioux Browning, Mod., Sara Graefe, Steven Galloway, Stephen Hunt, Ryan Knighton. | panel (30 MB MP3) |
| 2006 Residency | |
|---|---|
| Monday July 3rd | |
| Panel - "The Writing Life": An introduction to our faculty. | panel (27 MB MP3) Q&A (7 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 4th | |
| Panel - "State of the Art in Nonfiction" (Terry Glavin (M), Deborah Campbell, John Valiant, Brian Payton, JB Mackinnon) |
panel (21 MB MP3) Q&A (16 MB MP3) |
| Wednesday July 5th | |
| Instructor Talk - Brian Brett -"The Truth is a Story" | talk (17 MB MP3) Q&A (8 MB MP3) |
| Instructor Talk - Gary Geddes -"Narrative & Song: The Poets Duke it Out" | talk (24 MB MP3) |
| Panel - "Closer to Prayer than Prose: The Highly Charged Language of Poetry" (Susan Musgrave (M), Peter Levitt, Brian Brett, Catherine Owen, Gary Geddes) |
panel (43 MB MP3) |
| Thursday July 6th | |
| Instructor Talk - Catherine Bush, "Why Fiction Matters: Some Thoughts on Realism, Authenticity and Conviction" |
talk (16 MB MP3) Q&A (10 MB MP3) |
| Instructor Talk - Susan Musgrave, "The Writer as Commodity in the Noughties" | talk (10 MB MP3) Q&A (12 MB MP3) |
| Friday July 7th | |
| Instructor Talk - Sara Graefe, "Why theatre? - or, why I continue to write for the stage in the wireless age" | talk (17 MB MP3) Q&A (8 MB MP3) |
| Panel - "Revision" (Catherine Bush (M), Caroline Adderson, Pearl Luke, Keith Maillard) |
panel (24 MB MP3) Q&A (11 MB MP3) |
| Saturday July 8th | |
| Instructor Talk - Glen Huser, "Drawing from Life" | talk (23 MB MP3) Q&A (3 MB MP3) |
| Panel - "Freedom to Write" (Brian Brett (M), Shauna Singh Baldwin, Susan Musgrave, Jason Gratl) |
panel (24 MB MP3) Q&A (18 MB MP3) |
| Monday July 10th | |
| Panel - "Be a Blind Cat: seek out experience to feed your fiction!" (Gail Anderson-Dargatz (M), Catherine Bush, Steven Galloway) |
panel (20 MB MP3) Q&A (14 MB MP3) |
| Tuesday July 11th | |
| Instructor Talk - Gail Anderson-Dargatz, "On Editing" |
talk (28 MB MP3) |
| Panel - "Crossing Genres for Cash" (Sara Graefe (M), Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Timothy Taylor, Dennis Foon) |
panel (21 MB MP3) Q&A (11 MB MP3) |
| 2005 Residency |
|---|
| Monday June 27th |
| Panel - "The Writing Life": An introduction to our faculty. |
| Panel - "Making Light of it: Weighing in on the Comic Side in Literature" (Gary Geddes (M), Zsuzsi Gartner & Andrew Struthers) |
| Tuesday June 28th |
| Instructor Talk - Gary Geddes, "Making History Strange" |
| Panel - "Getting Past the Fear: Writing From Real Life Stories" (Gail Anderson Dargatz (M), Karen X. Tulchinsky, Evelyn Lau) |
| Wednesday June 29th |
| Instructor Talk - Susan Musgrave |
| Panel - "Literary Journalism". (Terry Glavin (M), Harold Rhenisch, Charles Montgomery, Charles Campbell) |
| Thursday June 30th |
| Instructor Talk - Gail Anderson-Dargatz, "The Writer's Life" |
| Panel - "The Writer & Cyberspace" (Andrew Gray (M), Kevin Chong, Mark Hamilton, Charles Campbell) |
| Friday July 1st |
| Instructor Talk - Terry Glavin, "Meta-Narrative" |
| Panel - "Writing Under the Influence" (Zsuzsi Gartner (M), Lee Henderson, Annabel Lyon, Gail Anderson-Dargatz) |
| Saturday July 2nd |
| Instructor Talk - Zsuzsi Gartner, "White Noise or O, Brand™ New World: the fiction challenge in the 21st Century" |
| Panel - "The Spiritualization of Cruelty." (Susan Musgrave (M), Charlotte Gill, Brian Brett, Evelyn Lau) |
