Now a staple of the Festival, this interactive, unpredictable workshop offers writing tips, tricks, and cues from five members of UBC School of Creative Writing’s illustrious department. Participants will learn key writing skills in five minutes or less through nimble, electrifying craft, and rapid-fire creativity. Try out concepts and ask questions of these creative writing teachers and authors. Full of invigorating thought exercises, Night Class explores a wide array of styles and genres, from poetry and song to comics and speculative fiction. This workshop is suitable for new and established authors. Hosted by Sarah Leavitt.
Presented in collaboration with UBC School of Creative Writing.
Event Participants:
ANOSH IRANI is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and a two-time winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. His novel, The Parcel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Quill and Quire, and the National Post. His latest play, Behind the Moon (2023), was a finalist for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. Anosh is an assistant professor at the UBC School of Creative Writing.
SARAH LEAVITT is a cartoonist and educator. She's developed and taught comics classes at the UBC School of Creative Writing since 2012. Her books include Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me; Agnes, Murderess; and Something, Not Nothing, forthcoming in fall 2024.
ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH (they/them) is the author of The Fact of a Body, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages and is in development with HBO. A 2023 United States Artists fellow and the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the UBC School of Creative Writing, Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre researched memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
CECILY NICHOLSON is the author of four books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Nicholson is the inaugural recipient of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society and will be the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley. She is an Assistant Professor in Poetry at the UBC School of Creative Writing.
A.E. OSWORTH is a transgender novelist. Their debut, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was long listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and The Tournament of Books. Their next novel, Awakened, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in March 2025 and is about a coven of trans witches fighting artificial intelligence with magic. They are a lecturer at the UBC School of Creative Writing where they teach fiction (both analog and interactive), as well as new media.
SHERYDA WARRENER is a poet, editor and teacher, most recently the author of Test Piece (Coach House Books, 2022). Her work has been published in the Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, The Believer, among other journals, and has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry, The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and the CBC Poetry Prize longlist. A recipient of the Puritan's Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry and the 2020/21 Killam Teaching Prize, she teaches poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the UBC School of Creative Writing.
