The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies invites accomplished novelists, essayists, poets, screenwriters, and playwrights present their work to students and the public on campus as well as other venues around the Okanagan. The Writer-in-Residence program promotes Canadian writing and literature to Okanagan residents and provides emerging writers with the opportunity to get feedback on their creative work. Each year faculty from the Creative Writing program host the Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture, the Nancy Holmes Alumni Spotlight, and invite writers into their classrooms.
Sharon Thesen was the first full professor in the Department of Creative Studies and is now professor emerita here at UBC. She is also a renowned Canadian poet and editor. The Creative Writing program at UBC intends for the Sharon Thesen lecture to acknowledge her contributions to British Columbian and Canadian literature and to the Creative Writing Program at UBC Okanagan. In her honor, a different writer each year will give a lecture that tackles key issues of contemporary writing, poetics, and Canadian literature. By recording each lecture, we will create a wonderful resource of contemporary thinking by writers.
The annual lecture is held on the third Wednesday in September each year.
The series is named in honour of Nancy Holmes, an internationally recognized artist, scholar, editor, community builder, and Professor Emerita in Creative Writing. Each year an alum of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies working in the areas of ecological or socially engaged research is invited to present their work in conversation with current graduate students or faculty.
Who: Amy Modahl (MFA ’13) in conversation with Sara Bursey (MFA visual arts)
When: Tuesday, March 3, 6:30pm
Where: CCS 224, Creative and Critical Studies building, UBC Okanagan
This event is free, accessible, and open to the public.
About Amy Modahl
In recent years, Salmon Arm-based artist Amy Modahl has focused on painting, a practice for which she was awarded the 2023 Tanabe Prize (mid-career painter). Modahl’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Wil Aballe (Vancouver) the Kelowna Art Gallery; Kamloops Art Gallery; the Alternator Centre (Kelowna); Stride Gallery and Wallace Galleries (Calgary); Vernon Public Art Gallery; and Soo Visual Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). She has an Interdisciplinary Masters of Fine Art in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus; a Masters in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University; and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art, Art History, and Spanish from St. Cloud State in Minnesota.
Amy Modahl’s painting practice follows two threads—still life and text—with a focus on materiality. Drawing daily from household and studio scenes, she finds humour and beauty in haphazard arrangements that become inadvertent tableaus, transitory records of lived experience. Objects merge and shift roles, forming a visual language that speaks beyond words. Her text-based works extend this inquiry: handwriting becomes gesture, meaning withheld or redacted yet still felt. As machine-driven communication expands, Modahl returns to the physical movement of the hand, investigating how language shapes perception and how material, space, and gesture guide our understanding of the world.
About Sara Bursey
Sara Bursey is an emerging interdisciplinary artist and museum professional previously based out of southern Ontario, currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus under the supervision of artist Briar Craig. Bursey’s work has appeared in duo and group exhibitions in Propeller Art Gallery (Toronto); Gallery 1313 (Toronto); Summaery at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany); Samuel J. Zacks Gallery, The Gales Gallery, and The Special Projects Gallery at York University (Toronto); and FINA Gallery at UBCO (Kelowna). She has a Specialized Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and Art History and a Certificate in Public History from York University in Toronto.
Her practice frequently centres around the affective qualities of the everyday object. Informed by her time caring for artefacts held in museum collections, household objects and personal trinkets have become a foundational element of her work. Focusing on what she describes as “the personal museum” she explores how memory, life, grief, and loss are preserved in the objects, words, and ephemera we choose to keep by interpreting their stories through textiles, sculpture, and installation.
The Inaugural Nancy Holmes Alumni Spotlight was held on March 4, 2025, and featured Kelly Shepherd (MFA Alum 2014) launching a new book, Dog and Moon, in conversation with second year MFA Creative Writing students, Amy Wang, Tosh Sherkat, and Slava Bart.
Shelley Wood was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence, and spent two weeks on campus in March 2024 offering feedback to students and local writers and offering a public talk. Originally from Vancouver, BC, Shelley Wood did her undergraduate degree in English Literature at McGill and her graduate degree in Journalism at UBC. Her short stories and creative nonfiction have been published in Grain, Room, Causeway Lit, Canadian Notes & Queries, Phoebe, the Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, Bath Flash Fiction, Freefall, and the Saturday Evening Post. Her debut novel, The Quintland Sisters (William Morrow, 2019), was an instant #1 Canadian bestseller. Her second novel, The Leap Year Gene, was published in August 2024 by Harper Collins Canada and Union Square Press (US).
Matthew Salesses is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely about adoption, race, and parenting for many national venues including NPR’s Code Switch, The New York Times’ Motherlode, VICE, Salon, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, the Center for Asian American Media, and The Good Men Project, on PBS, at Brown University, the Texas State, and Our Lady of the Lakes MFA programs; he has also spoken at adoption events and conferences, and at the Tin House, Kundiman, Writers @ Work, and Boldface writing conferences.
A public talk was held on September 26, 2022 and was co-hosted by UBC Vancouver’s School of Creative Writing.
2021 Writer in Residence
Naben Ruthnum joined us as the 2022 Writer in Residence, spending two weeks on campus from March 28 to April 5. He read and offered feedback on manuscripts from local writers, offered a free public lecture, and judged the Okanagan Short Story Contest while at UBCO.
Naben Ruthnum lives in Toronto, and is the author of the essay book Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race and the novel A Hero of Our Time. As Nathan Ripley, he is the author of two thrillers, Find You In the Dark and Your Life is Mine. His short fiction has won the Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award. He also writes for film and television, and has film and television projects in development at Oddfellows Entertainment.
Anti-racist Reading Series
The Anti-Racist Book Club and Reading Series presented a public reading with Katherena Vermette, a celebrated author of poetry, novels, children’s fiction and film. This wass the second in the book-club series, and readers discussed Vermette’s book, The Strangers.
This series was organized by Creative Writing professor Kevin Chong and presented with support from UBC’s Anti-Racism Initiatives Fund.
Creative Writing professor Matt Rader launched his new book, Ghosthawk on December 9th at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. This event was hosted and organized by the Inspired Word Café, sponsored by FCCS.
Ghosthawk is a guidebook of imagination from grasslands to star fields to the weather of the poet’s body, and was published by Nightwood Editions.
Kim Senklip Harvey was the Fall 2020 Writer-in-Residence at UBC Okanagan. From October 13 to 23, she worked with students, faculty and the community. She read and offered feedback on manuscripts from local writers; and offered a free public lecture.
Kim Senklip Harvey is a proud Syilx, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa and Dakelh woman and is a Fire Creator, Indigenous Theorist and Cultural Evolutionist.
More about Kim Senklip Harvey: kimsenklipharvey.com
The MOM Reading series is a collaboration of UBCO’s Creative Writing Program, Inspired Word Café, and Milkcrate Records.
The readings from invited local authors and from across Canada included: Laisha Rosnau (Book Launch) & Erin Scott; Darren Bifford (Book Launch) & Cole Mash; Liz Howard (Summer Intensive Artists-in-Residence); Richard Van Camp (FCCS Writer-in-Residence); Michael Turner & dia kabunda; Sharon Thesen & Penn Kemp; Suzette Mayr & Damien Rogers; Catherine Leroux; Dania Tomlinson & Ashley Little; Kelly Shepherd & John La Greca
The FCCS Reading Series featured writers from the Okanagan and beyond offering workshops, panels, and readings.
Events included Shifting CanLit, a panel with Juliane Okot Bitek, Karen Hofmann, Karis Shearer, Rob Budde; Stories Between: A conversation about Narrative and Voice, a panel with Margo Greenwood, Pauline Terbasket, Teresa Marshall, and Sarah de Leeuw; readings by authors Heidi Garnett, Sarah de Leeuw, Rob Budde, Juliane Okot Bitek, Clifton Joseph;editing poetry and spoken word workshops.
Reading the Valley welcomed a number of great writers and artists including:
Jeannette Armstrong, Corinna Chong, Joan Crate, Dina Del Bucchia, Sean Johnston, Jake Kennedy, John Lent, Evan Munday, Cecily Nicholson, Matt Rader, Harold Rhenisch, Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Moheb Soliman, Margo Tamez, Sharon Thesen, Caitlin Voth, and Daniel Zomparelli.
Various events were held on campus and in the community from February 7th to 10th, offering the chance to meet with writers, attend panels, expand your social network, and more.
The 2015-16 series included authors Kevin Chong, author of five books; Joanne Arnott ,a Métis/mixed-blood writer & arts activist; Ashley Little, author of five young adult novels; Garry Gottfriedson, a self- employed rancher from the Secwepemc Nation; Karen Hofmann, who has published fiction and poetry in several national literary magazines; Sean Johnston, author, co-edior of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations, and teachrs at Okanagan College.
