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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Lava Alapai, MFA 2025
Lava Alapai
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Lava Alapai, MFA. Lava’s graduate thesis is a full length play entitled TikTok Zoom; Or, That One Time in 2020.
Lava is a multiethnic scriptwriter and director from Okinawa, Japan. She was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she caught the dastardly theatre bug and made short films that she wrote, directed, and edited with two VHS players and her best friend’s camcorder. After graduating with an MFA in acting from the California Institute of the Arts, Lava toured internationally as a puppeteer. She has penned over five plays and three TV pilots while working on completing her MFA in Creative Writing- Theatre at UBC. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society (SDC) and Dramatists Guild.
It’s December 2020: the world’s on fire, everyone’s baking bread, and Ash—a software engineer —is clinging to sanity via code and caffeine. Enter his long-lost dad, Vincent, who waltzes back into his life via TikTok, memory loss in tow, like it’s not been 11 years of radio silence. What follows? Chaos, dance battles, and emotional landmines. TikTok Zoom is a pandemic-era dark comedy about estrangement, identity, and what happens when your past shows up uninvited—and joins your internet challenge. Think Black Mirror, but with more hugs and fewer robots. Maybe.
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Valentina Sierra, MFA 2025
Valentina Sierra
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Valentina Sierra, MFA. Valentina’s graduate thesis is a feature film screenplay entitled A Raging Sea.
Valentina, whose love for film and TV was instilled by her parents, pursued her dream of becoming a writer in UBC’s BFA and MFA Creative Writing programs. Over five years, she crafted a robust portfolio, including twelve scripts, and received over twenty accolades, notably a Top 3 Finalist position in the Final Draft Big Break Competition and a Grand Prize at GemFest Screenwriting Competition. Additionally, she delved into novel writing, which led to the completion of five novels. Valentina cherishes each word she writes and is forever thankful to her mentors, peers, and all who take the time to read her work.
A Raging Sea is a 19th-century drama set in England. On a remote island, Anna Atkins grieves her daughter’s death while enduring a suffocating marriage. Her husband, Alexander, consumed by the need for a male heir, grows volatile as she struggles to conceive. To restore Anna’s spirit, her mother sends Levina Martín, whose companionship evolves into a profound bond. Together, they confront Alexander’s schemes and risk everything to reclaim their lives. With heartbreak and vengeance simmering beneath the surface, this love story reveals the grit and strength of women who defy societal constraints, embrace their desires, and refuse to be erased.
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Kate Armstrong, MFA 2025
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Kate Armstrong, MFA. Kate’s graduate thesis is an adventure novel entitled Bluewater.
Kate served thirteen years in the military as a Logistics Officer and later spent two decades in the corporate world of electricity trading before realizing her dream of becoming a writer. She entered the MFA program as the award-winning author of her memoir, The Stone Frigate: The Royal Military College’s First Female Cadet Speaks Out, published in 2019. The book won the 2020 Ontario Historical Society Alison Prentice Award for the Best Book on Women’s History and was a finalist for the 2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Nonfiction. Her memoir’s success ignited a passion for literary prose and dreams of becoming a novelist.
Bluewater is an adventure drama novel centred on Claire Wilde, who experiences a catastrophic loss with the death of her husband and makes an impulsive decision to embark on an offshore sailing expedition with a rogue named Henry Slater. In the confined space of a sailboat on the open ocean, tensions flare, secrets are unveiled, and unresolved dysfunction surfaces. The microcosm of their inner struggles and relationship dynamics is mirrored in the macrocosm of the weather and the forces of nature throughout their journey. Bluewater explores liberation from harmful decision-making and highlights the restorative power of nature.
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