KPU Creative Writing Alumni Reading Showcase

Please join us for our first annual reading by alumni from Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s creative writing degree program! Established over ten years ago, our mentorship-based degree program features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting and new media streams, supports interdisciplinary inquiry and facilitates critical awareness, cultural sensitivity, social responsibility, civic engagement, and global citizenship. OUr department is now proud to present this new generation of poets, writers and interdisciplinary artists who have studied with us and variously contributed to the creative and intellectual vitality of our community.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

Hosted by

Geoffrey Nilson is a poet, editor, and literary critic who writes and lives as a guest on the unceded traditional territories of the Qayqayt people (New Westminster, BC). His most recent book Light Makes a Ruin was released in September 2022 with Ottawa’s above/ground press. Nilson hold a BA in Creative Writing from KPU and a MA in English from Simon Fraser University. Previously an warehouseman, musician, and copywriter, Nilson is currently a PhD student in the Department of English at SFU and teaches literature at Vancouver Community College.

With Readers:

Claire Matthews is a bi writer, editor, and educator who lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. She’s the co-founder of KPU’s first literary and arts magazine, pulp mag. Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry, Plenitude, Coast Mountain Culture, Prairie Fire, and Grain, among others. Her poetry recently received second place in CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. In her spare time, she makes soap and drinks bourbon.

Angela Rebrec is a multidisciplinary artist whose recent writing has appeared in Vallum, GRAIN, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Her poetry films have been recognized at the Barcelona International Film Festival, FilmmakerLife Awards, and Phoenix Shorts, among others. Angela’s 2020 collaboration with composer Mickie Wadsworth for ART SONG LAB has been included in NewMusicShelf’s Anthology of New Music for Trans & Nonbinary Voices, vol.1. She is the founding president of the Delta Literary Arts Society.

Franz Seachel is a South-Asian settler. Franz is doing her best to put more colour into the world. She means this both in the sense of brightening up the mundane with creation, as well as in her mission to uplift the truths of marginalized bodies. Follow her on Instagram, @franz_seachel.

Winston Lê (Lay) is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filing Station. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries in Maine.

Natasha Gauthier is a writer and visual artist of Indigenous and European heritage who explores themes of identity, hybridity, and the absurd in her work. Her writing has previously appeared in The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, and CV2. She is currently pursuing her MFA at UBC.

Nina Mosall was born in Surrey to Iranian refugees, and attended Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the University of British Columbia, in which she obtained her BA in Creative Writing and MA in Library Studies, respectively. Currently working as a librarian, she writes poetry during her spare time when she is not singing and reading to babies, or helping seniors figure out how to use cell phones. Her poetry and short stories have appeared frequently in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s literary magazine, Pulp, and in the literary magazine, Event. Bebakhshid is her debut poetry collection which comes out later this spring, exploring Middle Eastern identity, immigration, familial relationships, and the romance of everyday life. She hopes to die a horrible death in a horror film one day.

Penny So is a poet and zine-maker living on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam and Coast Salish peoples. She is of Chinese-Vietnamese descent. Her work has been published in pulp mag and she was the finalist in Two Sylvias Press 2018 Chapbook Prize. She has two cool cats and a spectacular dog; they all share a desk.

Elmer Flores (he/they) is a queer Salvadoran-Canadian settler who writes, creates, and learns on the ancestral, unceded and overlapping territories of the Qayqayt and other Coast Salish peoples. Elmer’s work focuses on queer immigrant experiences and how such lives confront, often violently, with the white ga(ys)ze of the post-colonial western world. Their other interests include: the rhetorics of queer health, the medicalization of the racialized queer body, constructions of gender within patriarchal cultures; and the whitewashing of non-binary gender identities.