Leslie Palleson, MFA 2026
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, MFA 2026
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, MFA 2026
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, MFA 2026
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, MFA 2026
Tayf Almoghazy
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Tayf Almoghazy, MFA. Tayf’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, MFA 2026
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.