The School of Creative Writing is welcoming several new faculty members this year.
“On behalf of the entire School, I’m pleased to extend a warm welcome to our incoming faculty members. We strive to provide an inclusive and supportive learning environment for our students, and our new faculty are committed to supporting this goal,” says Director Annabel Lyon.
Anosh Irani and Chelene Knight joined Creative Writing in January, and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and Austen Osworth will join the School in July.
Anosh Irani
Assistant Professor in Fiction
What is your area of teaching?
I have previously taught in the School of Creative Writing as an adjunct professor in the areas of fiction and playwriting. My focus as an assistant professor is in the area of fiction.
Why are you excited about being at UBC?
I feel very privileged to be part of such an accomplished faculty, and I am sure that my time at UBC will make me a better writer and teacher.
Chelene Knight
Adjunct Professor
Poetry and Optional Residency
What is your area of teaching?
My area of teaching is poetry and my approach focuses heavily on using poetry as a catalyst for creating new conversations through the lens of building a reimagined future in literature. At present, I am looking back and investigating the motivations of some of our most prolific Black female poets to explore history, love, activism, and grief in hopes of pulling from the past to create new and different futures.
Why are you excited about being at UBC?
I look forward to connecting with students and exploring all the beautiful possibilities poetry can bring. I value meeting students where they are at, and I am excited about UBC’s asynchronous course format which I think will help create the flexibility that students today need in order to thrive.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Assistant Professor in Creative Nonfiction
What is your area of teaching?
I write and teach creative nonfiction, with a focus on what the genre’s capaciousness allows us to evoke about the multiply narrated layers of life—which is to say that I write stories about the way we make and live stories. I’m particularly interested in work that hybridizes or transcends genre, like lyric nonfiction that uses juxtaposition and the space of silence in much the way poetry does, or nonfiction that includes and acknowledges wish, dream, and imagination. Much of my work also has a political or social justice impetus behind it. My first book, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, combined an investigation into a 1992 death penalty case with a memoir about my family to get at story-making about the past in both the American criminal justice system and individual lives. I’m currently at work on my second, Both and Neither, which is a transgender and trans-genre examination of life beyond the binary.
Why are you excited about being at UBC?
I’m deeply excited to be joining such an expansive, vibrant school of creative writing—the genre possibilities at UBC really are unparalleled, and I am so looking forward to all the conversations with students and colleagues to come! Not to mention all the conversations and collaborations across the larger university. It also means a lot to me to be joining a university with such a strong commitment to diversity, access, and social justice. Great work is happening at UBC and I’m eager to be a part of it. I deeply believe that everything good, ambitious, and paradigm-shifting starts with learning and connection. And then, of course, there’s the area’s stunning natural beauty! I find I think and breathe better in view of the mountains and the water—something about a reminder of the scale of even our most absorbing human stories—and I am excited to get out the door and explore all British Columbia has to offer.
A.E. Osworth
Fiction Lecturer
What is your area of teaching?
I’m going to be teaching both traditional and interactive fiction, as well as new media. My favorite ways to make work use many kinds of processes stitched together, often borrowing tools and techniques from digital space for use in my novels. I’m currently working on collaborating with artificial intelligence in the writing of my next book.
Why are you excited about being at UBC?
I’m excited to be at UBC for so many reasons, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll choose one: the School of Creative Writing is such an innovator in the pedagogy of fiction. I’m excited to join an amazing group of people who not only think deeply about their own work and publishing, but who are wholly committed to thinking as deeply about constructing learning spaces that truly teach creativity.
