Creative Writing alumni published a wide range of work in 2021. From fiction to poetry to nonfiction, mixing genres and category, these publications invite us to consider new perspectives. Discover a new read below or on our Alumni Publications page.
Equipoise
Katie Zdybel
MFA ’20
The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigorously seeking equipoise.
Equipoise was shortlisted for the 2018 HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction.
The Strangers
Katherena Vermette
MFA ’14
A breathtaking companion to her bestselling debut The Break, Vermette’s The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
Winner of the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A Globe & Mail Best Book
Rabbits
Terry Miles
MFA ’08
A deadly underground game might just be altering reality itself in this all-new adventure set in the world of the hit Rabbits podcast.
The identities of these winners are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more dangerous the game becomes.
NISHGA
Jordan Abel
MFA ’12
Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.
Exhibitionist
Molly Cross-Blanchard
MFA ’19
Painfully funny, brutally honest, and alarmingly perceptive, Molly Cross-Blanchard’s poems use humour and pop culture as vehicles for empathy and sorry-not-sorry confessionalism. What this speaker wants more than anything is to be seen, to tell you the worst things about herself in hopes that you’ll still like her by the end.
The Octopus Has Three Hearts
Rachel Rose
MFA ’05
Rachel Rose’s finely tuned sense of irony is evident in this collection, which embraces the strange and unexpected, exploring the outer limits of empathy and forgiveness. Her flawed and broken characters, who may range far from readers’ own lived experiences, reveal universal elements of the human condition and the curious redemption of the human-animal bond.
