Yifan Li, MFA 2025
Yifan Li
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Yifan Li, MFA. Yifan’s thesis is a novel entitled Tumbleweed.
Yifan Li (he/him) is a queer writer and theatre artist. He holds a BA in Theatre Studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. His work explores queer Asian diasporic life and cultural resistance. His fiction has appeared in The Passengers Journal, Ricepaper Magazine, and elsewhere.
Ming is a queer from China who leaves his homeland for France, hoping to find a place of belonging. Haunted by the shadow of family expectations and a political past he can’t outrun, he is forced to confront what kind of life he truly wants. Through moments of solitude, tenderness, and memory, Tumbleweed paints an intimate portrait of exile and queer longing; a quiet, uncertain search for freedom and self in unfamiliar places.
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natasha gauthier, MFA 2025
natasha gauthier
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate natasha gauthier, MFA. natasha’s thesis is a hybrid memoir entitled Restless//Reckless.
natasha came to the program with a special interest in hybridity, determined to blend visual art with text as an exploration of inhabiting the space between worlds. While in the program, she served as Prose Editor of PRISM international, worked as a writer and gallery assistant at the Centre for International Contemporary Art (CICA Vancouver), and created a comic for the Exams Under Anaesthesia (EUA) Graphics partnership with UBC and the BC Children’s Hospital. She is a member of the Indigenous Brilliance Collective, and the Growing Room Collective through Room Magazine, where she is the Assistant Editor for issue 48.4.
Restless//Reckless is a memoir that blends prose poems with visual art to form meditations on growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety, and depression while navigating and surviving family chaos, mental health, and addictions as a mixed-heritage female. This work also explores the fleeting and haunting nature of existence, relationships, and memory, the magic of making something from nothing, and the call to create.
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Dawn Amber Tonks, MFA 2025
Dawn Amber Tonks
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Dawn Amber Tonks, MFA. Dawn Amber’s thesis is a screenplay entitled The International Auntie Pageant.
Dawn Amber Tonks is a member of the St’uxwtéws band of the Secwepmec Nation from the interior of British Columbia. She has just completed her Master of Fine Arts with UBC. Dawn has published a poem Weykt in Canadian Lit magazine. For her thesis she wrote a feature length screen play, titled The International Auntie Pageant. For which she has had to learn a lot about beauty pageants, as well as how to spell “pageant”. She writes in most genres and largely focuses on Indigenous life in Canada.
The International Auntie Pageant is a feature length screenplay. When Rhonda Williams finds out her niece Faith has nominated her and her friends to compete in a beauty pageant she is flabbergasted. What business do four mid-aged Indigenous women have being beauty contestants? When small town women take on the big city in with big dreams of even bigger wins, magic can happen. Follow Rhonda, Tara, Kimmy and Christine as they take on Vancouver and The International Auntie Pageant.
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Paulina Dominguez, MFA 2025
Paulina Dominguez
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Paulina Dominguez, MFA. Paulina’s graduate thesis is a speculative novel entitled Sonambula.
Paulina is a Mexican writer with a background in graphic design and digital art. During her time at UBC, she took on the role of Promotions Editor at PRISM international while continuing to make surreal collages and animations as a freelance artist. She was a semifinalist for the 2021 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Competition and is currently working on long-form film projects and her debut novel. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and a screenwriting diploma from ESCAC in Catalunya, Spain. Through her work, she investigates the dialogue between magic and realism, connection and disconnection, grief and death.
Sonambula interrogates grief and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Struck by the loss of her older brother, a twelve-year-old girl finds herself avoiding her strict aunt, battling the heatwave that has swept over Mexico’s western coast, and trying to convince her younger sister that the abandoned lighthouse at the edge of town is mysteriously active. Her plans to evade any mention of her late brother—particularly after some undesirable family news—are disrupted by Sonam
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Request more information about Paulina’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.