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. 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 seventh Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture will be presented by Cecily Nicholson.
Date: Wednesday, September 23 at 7 pm
Location: Online via Zoom
Participants Cecily Nicholson and Sharon Thesen will be present in the UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives (OSC). As space is limited in the OSC, the public is invited to attend this event virtually.
The second tenet of the Poetry for the People program, officially established in 1991 by the late UC Berkeley professor June Jordan, is that “words can change the world and save our lives.” Drawing on her experience teaching in carceral, community arts, as well as university spaces in the Pacific North, this talk takes up a liberational genealogy of the “workshop” alongside current reflections on the poetry of witness and correspondence.
Cecily Nicholson, photo credit: Jef Clarke
Cecily Nicholson is a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and the inaugural Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award. Nicholson held the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley and teaches in the School of Creative Writing at UBC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, considers the daily movement of crows.
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: Erin Scott (MFA ’18), in conversation with Katya Kirschman (current MFA creative writing student)
When: Tuesday, November 3, 6:30pm
Where: CCS 224, Creative and Critical Studies building, UBC Okanagan
This event is free, accessible, and open to the public.
In this talk, interdisciplinary artist-scholar Erin Scott will reflect on select projects such as her spoken word album and touring show NOT FUNNY, to her participatory theatre MFA thesis show Truth or Consequences, to her most recent digital, video poetic exhibitions. Scott’s work prioritizes feminist concepts, relational aesthetics, ecological rights, and community engagement. With varied formal outputs, Scott considers herself a writer first, with many possibilities for public presentation of said writing. Scott has over two decades of community based art collaborations, including with Kelowna-based literary arts nonprofit Inspired Word Cafe, and she will interweave her history of solo and community projects in honour of Nancy Holmes’s unique contributions to the UBC and Okanagan communities.
Erin Scott (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar who works in time-based mediums, including poetry, performance, and video/audio. Erin is a founding member of Inspired Word Café, a literary arts nonprofit. With publications and performances across forms, they have made spoken word albums, books, exhibitions, drag performances, Fringe shows, scholarly articles, social and community art, videopoems and more. Erin holds an MFA and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Digital Arts and Humanities where she makes videopoems and writes about Scottish Gaelic, identity, and belonging. Her most recent work, On Masking (2026), is available through www.brokepress.ca. Erin lives in Rutland, on the unceded territories of the syilx peoples of the Okanagan Nation Alliance, with her partner and their four children.
(Image: Go Gentle Opening, Knox Mountain, 2025; photo credit Michael and SuZanne Hintringer Photography)
The second annual Nancy Holmes Spotlight event was held on March 3, 2026 with Amy Modahl (MFA ’13) in conversation with Sara Bursey (MFA visual arts).
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.
