Writer In Residence
Throughout the 2023/2024 academic year, I was available to consult with aspiring writers on their projects at McMaster University, Hamilton Public Library, and over Zoom. I also facilitated writing workshops and lead seminars — all of which were free and available to everyone. Ultimately, I was able to mentor nearly 150 new and emerging writers from Hamilton and beyond.
About Me
I’m the Hamilton-based author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), which won the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and was selected by CBC as one of the best Canadian poetry collections of 2021. (It’ll be going to the moon in 2024.) I’m also the author of a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), a picture book which was nominated for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. I’m a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. In addition to my creative work, I serve on the board of the Hamilton Review of Books and as Membership Committee Chair for The League of Canadian Poets. I hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and my stories and poems have been published in literary magazines across Canada. I recently completed my first collection of short fiction and I’m now working on a novel.
My Facilitation Philosophy
From the beginning of my writing career, I've moved between the inner world of creative discovery and the outer world of community building and connection. I first began teaching general population writing workshops out of a renovated bank vault at the back of a Toronto coffee shop in 2015. Since then, I’ve facilitated writing workshops at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape, at gritLIT here in Hamilton, at the Hamilton Fringe Festival’s Spark program, and at Indigo locations across the GTHA. I’ve also taught dozens of workshops around my own kitchen table, and over the past eight years, I’ve mentored a diverse group of emerging writers one-on-one, both virtually and in person.
My teaching philosophy draws on my training in the Amherst Writers & Artists Method of workshop facilitation, Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, and my own experiences working with writers from all walks of life. The work of writing and writing education doesn't take place in a vacuum -- it always happens within a larger societal context of racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, classism, and cisheteropatriachy. I aim to create trauma-informed workshops and mentorships that acknowledge writers as expansive human beings with complex responsibilities, histories, and full lives. My heartfelt intention as a facilitator is first to avoid doing harm and causing creative injury. Next, to encourage creative freedom and play. And finally, to help writers develop their craft so that their work can be as effective as possible, with the writer's own intentions always guiding that process.
