Leslie Palleson
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Leslie Palleson, MFA. Leslie‘s thesis is an interconnected collection of stories and novella entitled The Apron and other stories.
Leslie Palleson came to the program with the goal of perfecting years (okay – decades) of developing the craft of writing and has been delighted to work alongside a cornucopia of talented writers and faculty. While in the program, she has published several stories in journals such as TNQ, Dalhousie Review, subTerrain, Event, Antigonish Review, filling station, won multiple writing awards, as well as scholarships, provided reviews and interviews for Prism Online, read for Prism literary journal, and acted as teaching assistant for the same undergraduate writing courses so many times she lost count.
The Apron and other stories in an interconnected collection that satirizes the lives of smart funny middle-class women who live, or want to live, on a privileged family-friendly cul-de-sac. Dark humour permeates as these women navigate divorce, smart ass kids, narcissists, and so much lost potential. Sometimes based in realism and at other times unfurling into speculative, these women struggle to make sense of their lives, butting up against contemporary myths like gender equality and the North American dream, sacrificing their own dreams to maintain family harmony and blaming themselves for not being able to do better. Still, they persevere.
Contact
Request more information about Leslie‘s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Ayda Niknami
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Ayda Niknami, MFA. Ayda’s thesis is a stage play entitled Azar o Azadi.
Ayda Niknami (she/they) is a Qashqai-Irani queer femme residing in so-called “Vancouver”. She was the Poetry Editor for PRISM international (2024-2026), a finalist for The Bridge Prize (2024), shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Poetry Award (2025), and published in an anthology by Guernica Editions (Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution, 2025). Her writing explores Iranian diasporic subjectivity, love, and relational autonomy. Ayda holds an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC, and an MA in Philosophy from UC San Diego. When she’s not writing, she’s juggling her addiction to hot yoga with her addiction to cigarettes.
Azar o Azadi is a semi-autobiographical stage drama centered on Azar Momeni, a young Iranian woman, after, before, and during an episode of psychosis which takes place in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown. As Azar navigates the implications of her new bipolar I diagnosis, including the perils of institutionalization, medication, and their possible legal consequences, she is forced to confront the tension between her creative drives and the possibility of building a new self-image under the shadow of suicidality. Azar’s relationships with those around her help her navigate her isolation, as she searches for a new kind of autonomy through art.
Contact
Request more information about Ayda’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Laurence Neal
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Laurence Neal, MFA. Laurence‘s thesis is a novel entitled What the Body Deserves.
Laurence is a trans/nonbinary writer, historian, and artist with dual master’s degrees in History and Creative Writing. Their essays in Dissent and Guernica interrogate how physical space is gendered and raced in community building and politics, and their scholarship analyzes Alt Right origins. Their short fiction was a Summer Literary Prize finalist, and their poetry will appear in Eavesdrop’s 2026 anthology. They create queer-centered poetry installations with partners like LAND, The Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The City of Los Angeles, and The City of West Hollywood.
What the Body Deserves is a fugitive roadtrip novel about the search for queer equality. Written explicitly against Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, it follows a nameless American protagonist who seeks easy rebellion but instead encounters violence and a trans awakening about the necessity of releasing toxic white masculinity on the path to true transition and liberation. An excerpt of this novel was longlisted for the 2026 Disquiet Literary Prize, whose jury “loved the emotionality threaded through this piece and the tension it creates–fear, pain, anger, and hope all welded together” and called it “a fearful, feral firecracker of a story.”
Contact
Request more information about Laurence‘s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Elio Zarrillo
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Elio Zarrillo, MFA. Elio‘s thesis is a play entitled If We Be Friends.
Elio Zarrillo is a prairie-born queer originally from Treaty 1 territory, now based on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, having recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing & Theatre at the University of British Columbia. They have spent over 15 years making live performance works across the country as an actor, writer, director, dramaturg, and arts educator.
When a text from an old friend interrupts Neptune’s daily work-flow, it cracks open stories from the past they’ve never been able to finish. If We Be Friends moves between the present day and the early aughts, when teenage best friends Neptune and Phoebe found freedom in art & partying in a special forest facing imminent threat. When they begin rehearsing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, their palpable creative intimacy spirals into a disruption and transformation. Through zine-making, self-invention and Shakespeare, this is a tenacious queer coming-of-age story about authenticity, resistance and the cost that comes with being known.
Contact
Request more information about Elio’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Tayf Almoghazy
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Elio Zarrillo, MFA. Elio’s thesis is a collection of nonfiction lyrical essays entitled A Departure and an Unsettling: On precarious migration in the hour of genocice.
Tayf is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Cairo, Egypt. Their work moves across disciplines to examine identity, memory, intimacy, and political belonging. Through lyric and experimental forms, they engage with personal narrative alongside histories of displacement, conflict, and cultural inheritance. Tayf served as Executive Editor of PRISM international from 2024–2025 while completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Their practice is grounded in artistic experimentation, collaboration, and community engagement across literary and cultural spaces.
A Departure and an Unsettling explores how queerness, faith, migration, and displacement shape belonging. Through personal reflections, storytelling, and poetic language, the text moves between the author’s lived experience and the larger global context in which this life unfolds. Written lyrically and out of chronology, the work draws from personal narrative, fragments of memory, and historic events, from the Egyptian revolution, to the genocide in Palestine and the ongoing irradiation of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. The work examines sexuality, gender, religion, and resilience in the face of public erasure of marginalised lives.
Contact
Request more information about Tayf’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Tristan Hay Lee
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Tristan Hay Lee, MFA. Tristan’s thesis is a young adult contemporary rom-com novel entitled Drama Kids.
Tristan is a Toronto-born writer of Korean, Japanese, and European descent. Her work has been published in Room, Ricepaper and The Selkie, as well as shortlisted for the Bridge Prize. Her previous young adult manuscript, which explores the enduring impact of the Japanese Canadian internment, was shortlisted for the 2022 HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. Tristan has written over 20 episodes for several children’s animated shows, including Caillou, Cocomelon, and Marc Brown’s HOP. On her days off, you can find her playing pickleball terribly or thrifting yet another leather jacket she doesn’t need. Her website is tristanhaylee.com.
Tristan’s YA contemporary rom-com novel Drama Kids follows seventeen-year-old Mars Park, whose aspirations to be a serious stage director conflict with her growing crush on the lead actor Dominic, a laid-back jock who’s never acted in his life. Unbeknownst to her, Dominic is grappling with his mother’s cancer diagnosis, which threatens to jeopardize their end-of-year performance—along with the future Mars has worked so hard to secure. An adolescent ode to the messiness and joy of high school theatre, Drama Kids explores themes of creative collaboration, familial duty, and the myriad forms of pressure we encounter in our teens.
Contact
Request more information about Tristan’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Camille Pavlenko
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Camille Pavlenko, MFA. Camille’s thesis is a novel entitled Fata Morgana.
Camille Pavlenko is a theatre and literary artist who is passionate about contributing to the arts ecology of the Canadian prairies, where she works as a writer, actor, and playwright. She has been the playwright-in-residence at Alberta Theatre Projects, Alberta Musical Theatre Company, and Quest Theatre. Her short story “Georgie Millionaire“, was awarded the first place prize in ROOM Magazine’s Fiction Contest and she is a proud two-time recipient of the Shevchenko Foundation’s Short Prose Prize for her stories “The Cure for Breathlessness” and “Kuzmenko Residence“, all of which were written during her MFA.
Set at the tail end of the Age of Sail, Fata Morgana concerns the events following the discovery of a group of female castaways in the middle of the South Pacific. This historical fiction novel investigates the inner workings of class, gender, and sexuality on board an 18th century barque. Featuring a carousel of often-irreverent points-of-view, including those of the non-human witnesses aboard HMS Inspiration, this thesis novel follows exceptionally adequate midshipman, Davy Bly, as he pursues an increasingly desperate path to officer-hood, in the middle of a rapidly-unravelling naval hierarchy, 10,000KM from home.
Contact
Request more information about Camille’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Denise Da Costa
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Denise Da Costa, MFA. Denise’s thesis is a novel entitled Misericordia.
Denise Da Costa is a Niagara-based writer whose work explores love, class, and mental health. She holds a B.A. in psychology from York University, and has worked in the technology industry for many years. Her debut novel And the Walls Came Down (Dundurn, 2023), was longlisted for the 2024 Toronto Book Award. During her time at UBC, she served on the PRISM magazine editorial board and published pieces in Geist and Existère magazines, respectively. Additionally, she hosted workshops and panels at the TIFA and FOLD festivals as well as other literary events.
Misericordia is a dystopian fantasy that follows Alicia, a disgruntled and overlooked mid-manager employed at a thriving AI company. She is promoted to lead an unethical AI project just as she takes on new caretaking duties at home. Conflicted, she attempts to balance work, and the needs of her newly unemployed husband, their aging parents, and dependent adult children. Straddling family drama, corporate mystery, and sci-fi, her story highlights the intersections of family, capitalism, technology, and duty.
Contact
Request more information about Denise’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Lauren Grant
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Lauren Grant, MFA. Lauren’s thesis is a novel entitled Her Madness.
Lauren Grant is a writer and award-winning filmmaker. Her company, Clique Pictures, focuses on telling stories of women pushing against societal expectations. As a writer and director, her short films are Things We Feel But Do Not Say and Erase & Rewind. Her producing work includes the feature films Sugar Daddy, The Retreat, Riot Girls, Wet Bum, Picture Day, and the documentaries Modern Whore, Wilfred Buck, On the Line, Metamorphosis, and Traceable. Lauren served as an executive producer on the Amazon series The Sticky, and her essay “Body Rubble,” about birth after miscarriage, was published in Griffel literary magazine.
Her Madness explores themes of family, mental health, infertility, what we inherently take with us, and what we choose to leave behind. It follows ambitious seamstress Florence MacGregor, who defies societal expectations and the stigma of her mother’s suspected madness by navigating marriages of necessity, love, and security from working-class Glasgow to the bustling city of Montreal in 1917. As she finds success in her career and stability in her third marriage, Florence’s infertility triggers a decision that sends her mental health spiraling with the fear that she carries her mother’s illness.
Contact
Request more information about Lauren’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
Nicole Fitzgerald
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Nicole Fitzgerald, MFA. Nicole’s thesis is a memoir entitled A Cloud Collector.
Nicole Fitzgerald’s writing grew up in the mountains of Whistler, BC where she worked as a journalist in print, television and documentary film for two decades. Her love of nature combined with motherhood and a pandemic led to the inspiration behind her memoir, A Cloud Collector. During her time in the MFA program, she also wrote a middle grade novel, The Rain Folk, and a picture book, Under One Sky. Nicole and her daughter now camp 100 days of the year. When not on the road, Nicole spent three years with the New Shoots program, teaching creative writing at Point Grey and Templeton secondary schools as well as the Vancouver Public Library.
A Cloud Collector is a memoir following the different skies a mother and child travel while navigating the uncertainty of a changing climate with the help of a 17-foot travel trailer. The daughter is deemed at risk by doctors during the pandemic and subsequent wildfire and virus seasons to come, forcing the mother to find a creative way through. A chance encounter at an RV dealership leads to the purchase of a trailer the mother is in no way equipped to drive. The two will camp 100 days of the year collecting clouds and bird song to better understand their place in the world. A natural world the daughter will come to love and fight for.
Contact
Request more information about Nicole’s thesis project using our 2026 Graduate Showcase Contact Form.
