Damini Kane
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Damini Kane, MFA. Damini’s graduate thesis is a speculative fiction novel entitled Silvering.
Damini’s love of speculative stories began at a young age, with transportive novels such as Walter Moers’ The City of Dreaming Books and visual media such as anime and graphic novels. She has come to see the fantasy genre like a petri dish: a way to examine ideas in unique contexts. Her work has been published in the Lakeview Journal, the Purple Breakfast Review, and Muse India, and has appeared on Podcastle, an award-winning fantasy fiction podcast. For her piece Words like Frost, she was awarded the second place prize in the Joy Kogawa Award for Literature by the Surrey Muse Arts Society.
Silvering is a speculative fiction novel exploring religion and the relationship between divinity and humanity. As Dove falls to her death, she captures the attention of Entii, the three-faced god of a strict sect of Messengers; a sect that Dove has belonged to since she was a child. Entii promises to save her life, if Dove tells him about her past—and the pasts of her friends. But Entii’s promise is contingent on Dove’s continued faith in him. And she’s not sure what she believes anymore. Is it possible to be a good Messenger? And must it always come at the cost of being a good person?
Contact
Request more information about Damini’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Andrea Scott
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Andrea Scott, MFA. Andrea’s graduate thesis is a collection of poetry entitled The World in My Mouth.
Andrea is a writer living in Victoria, BC, the traditional territory of the Lekwungen peoples. Poems written during her MFA have appeared in many journals and two public projects: Poetry in Transit and the City of Victoria’s Public Poetry Remix Project. She won the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry contest and the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Contest. Her first poetry collection, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, was published in spring 2024. Andrea only had eyes for poetry entering the MFA, but along the way discovered a love of comics, screenwriting and writing for children. She’s currently finishing a YA novel in verse called Birdnesting.
The World in My Mouth is a poetry collection that explores the complexities of mothering — and grieving a mother — on a changing planet. The poems in The World in My Mouth celebrate, grieve, and meditate on the human experience: the joys and limitations of our bodies, our memories, our families, our lovers, our connections to Planet Earth. Poems in free verse and traditional forms are interwoven in this collection, with threads of darkness and dystopia intersecting those of humour and hope.
Contact
Request more information about Andrea’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Jazeen Hollings
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Jazeen Hollings, MFA. Jazeen’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled The Deeper We Go.
With the grace and poise of a flamingo lacking knees, Jazeen, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, retired from her seven year stint as a video editor to join the program and dedicate herself fully to her writing practice. During her time here, she discovered a deep love of poetry, found a quirky, albeit slightly unhinged, humour-injected creative nonfiction voice, and became insistent on teaching creative writing after grad school. She produced a novel, a screenplay, is currently working on a chapbook, and runs her own creative writing workshops that blend academia, personal exploration, and militant creative support.
The Deeper We Go is a family dramedy novel set in the once booming Ontario mining town of Elliot Lake. Eleanor, a single mother trying her damned best, struggles to provide financially and emotionally for her ambitious ballet-obsessed teenage daughter, Anna, and for her delinquent adult son, Michael. She desperately tries to hold the family together as Anna descends into a frightful opioid addiction and Michael’s mishaps turn violent. Part family drama, part political commentary on boom to bust towns, the novel’s core pulses with themes of motherhood and the importance of letting go.
Contact
Request more information about Jazeen’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Andrea Mullan
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Andrea Mullan, MFA. Andrea’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled Spare Me the Details.
Andrea Mullan is a writer/filmmaker who grew up in a large Irish immigrant family playing music and telling stories Saturday nights around the kitchen table. She is an alumnus of the National Screen Institute’s Totally Television Program and winner of the Cogeco Pre-Development Fund for Series as well as the OMDC On Screen Initiatives Fund for Series. She was an Exec Producer on the independent feature Dim the Flourescents which won first place in the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival. She worked in the Toronto film and television industry for nineteen years before returning to university and completing an Honours BA in English at the University of Toronto in 2019.
Spare Me the Details, is a novel cycle comprised of ten short stories about a young woman struggling to come to terms with a life overshadowed by addiction and abuse. It addresses central questions of selfhood and identity as the protagonist attempts to escape the generational cycle of addiction in her family and trace a path toward healing, reconciliation and recovery. The intimacy of caring for her dying father finally allows her to see the fragile humanity of her parents and understand the source of pain in their collective past.
Contact
Request more information about Andrea’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Adrian Matias Bell
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Adrian Matias Bell, MFA. Adrian’s graduate thesis is a literary novel entitled Head.
Adrian is a queer and trans writer and musician who came to UBC from Oakland, California. While in the program, he served as Editor in Chief of PRISM international and enjoyed volunteering every week at the Musqueam Garden. He also worked with Sheryda Warrener on The Provocation Collection, an interdisciplinary pedagogical resource for visual artists and poets. Adrian’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Echolocation, Qwerty, Protean Mag, and elsewhere, as well as from Girl Dad Press. He also makes music as Nightjars.
Head, Adrian’s first book, is a new adult literary fiction novel. In 2017, in the immediate wake of a sexual assault, Marty arrives at Callahan College and must navigate an increasingly complex web of academic overachievement, queer romance, their own evolving identity, and their desire for violent revenge. Darkly funny and unapologetically queer, Head examines the complexities of identity, community, and what it might actually mean to survive.
Contact
Request more information about Adrian’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Margo LaPierre
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Margo LaPierre, MFA. Margo’s graduate thesis is a literary novel entitled Lucid Mechanics.
Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer freelance editor and writer who aims to reduce stigma associated with bipolar disorder and psychosis. Her second poetry collection, Ajar, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in October 2025. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence. An alumnus of Banff Centre and Sage Hill residencies and Toronto Metropolitan’s publishing program, she has served on Arc Poetry magazine’s executive and editorial boards since 2019. You can find her writing in the Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, filling Station, and elsewhere.
Her debut literary novel is a metaphysical love story set in a Toronto strip club in 2012. James Judas is a suicidal subway track-maintenance worker in love with a stripper—his girlfriend, Lux—a dancer aging out of work. He’s on track to die young, and she fears dying alone. The novel depicts psychotic episodes as dangerous yet accurate glimpses of reality’s structure. Lucid Mechanics will remind readers that those who are stigmatized due to illness, addiction, sex work, or their sexuality deserve love, family, and a happy ending. For readers of Denis Johnson, Alicia Elliott, and Rufi Thorpe.
Contact
Request more information about Margo’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Siavash Saadlou, MFA 2025
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Siavash Saadlou, MFA. Siavash’s graduate thesis is a collection of stories entitled Think of the Sea.
Born and raised in Iran, Siavash is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose piece, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected as a Notable Essay by Robert Atwan for the 2023 Best American Essays series. His short stories, essays, and works of translation have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, and Southeast Review, among many other journals. Siavash is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. He is currently editing his debut novel.
Siavash’s story collection explores émigré life, sexual identity, patriarchy, and displacement through Iranian and diasporic experiences. In the title story, an unnamed narrator—a middle-aged cab driver—makes extra money by visiting graves on behalf of Iranian expats unable to return home for political reasons. In “The Winning Goal,” a woman fearing the government’s draconian anti-abortion laws faces the insidious complications of terminating her pregnancy on her own. “A Deep Breath” follows Sima, a girl suffering from pica, who conspires with her unworldly boyfriend to murder her despotic dad. The collection includes eight stories in total.
Contact
Request more information about Siavash’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
