MA in the Field of Creative Writing Program Faculty Biographies

Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She's the author of a collection of short stories, Circus (McClelland & Stewart 2014); an academic monograph, Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press (Bloomsbury 2018); two collaboratively written academic books (Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities, Palgrave 2017, and Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, Bloomsbury 2017); a handful of poems; some short stories; some book reviews; and many academic articles and book chapters on book and publishing history, digital archives, contemporary letterpress printing, and 20th-century literature.

Poet, writer, and scholar George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, in 1960. The inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has also taught at Duke University (1994-99), McGill University (1998-99), The University of British Columbia (2002), Mount Allison University (2005), and Harvard University (2013-14). His many honours include the Portia White Prize for Artistic Achievement (1998), Governor-General's Award for Poetry (2001), the National Magazine Gold Medal for Poetry (2001), the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award (2004), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize (2005-2008), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (2006), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (2009), appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia (2006), appointment to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer (2008), and eight honorary doctorates. He was Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and is Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2016-17). His second novel is The Motorcyclist (2016). His newest poetry works are Traverse (2014), Extra Illicit Sonnets (2015), Gold (2016), and Canticles I (MMXVI) (2016), the first part of a projected three-book epic.

Andrew DuBois is the author of a book of poetry (All the People Are Pregnant, 2021), a collection of essays and reviews (Start to Figure, 2020), a lyrical novella (He We Her / I Am White, 2019), and a book of criticism (Ashbery's Forms of Attention, 2006). He also co-edited Close Reading: The Reader (2003) and The Anthology of Rap (2010), the latter of which was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Village Voice, called by Cornel West "an instant classic," and deemed by Nikki Giovanni to be "much needed, much needed." A proud past Editor-in-Chief of echolocation, Andrew's work has appeared in such places as American Literary History, Harvard Review, LA Review of Books, Music & Literature, The New York Times Book Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, and World Literature Today. Book chapters can be found in such collections as The Cambridge History of American Literature, A Companion to American Poetry, Melville and Aesthetics, and The Turn Around Religion in America, while multiple encyclopedia entries appear in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He has emceed or hosted events featuring such respected figures as Kurtis Blow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Common, LaTasha Diggs, Grandmaster Caz, Immortal Technique, Imani Perry, and Touré, and in 2015 he was one of a handful of curators, artists, and critics asked to narrate the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time. His poem "Yellow Tulips" was recently chosen to appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2021. A graduate of Duke (B.A.) and Harvard (Ph.D.) and a professor here since 2004, Andrew splits his time between the GTA and Carbonear, Newfoundland, where he is owner of the Green Door Book Store. His current projects include co-editing a collection of Charles Whibley's essays, writing a critical biography of Anita Loos that looks at her work and her hat collection, and trying to learn Icelandic.

Richard Greene is a poet, biographer, and critic. His third collection of poems Boxing the Compass (Signal Editions, 2009) was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Nigel Beale observed in The Globe and Mail that it was “Characterized by powerful, arresting openings, sharp aphoristic jabs ... sonnet-like solutions, pithy ironies...; and Thomas Hardy's ability to convey poignant, pointed feeling using just a faint brush stroke...” His fourth collection, Dante’s House (Signal Editions, 2013) contains a long poem in terza rima, set in contemporary Italy; George Elliott Clarke has described that work as “a masterpiece” and compared Greene’s poetry to that of Derek Walcott (Chronicle Herald). In 2015, Greene’s poem “You Must Remember This” was awarded the National Magazine Award (Gold). Following scholarly books on Mary Leapor and Graham Greene, his major biography of the modernist poet Edith Sitwell was published by Little, Brown in 2011. A two-fisted assault on critical orthodoxy, it reasserts the value of an often derided modernist poet. Stuart Kelly observes in The Scotsman: “Greene very boldly claims Sitwell as the finest female English poet of the 20th century, and the pre-eminent poet of the blitz…. Greene's [strategy] works… [T]he book gives a proper overview of her oeuvre.” Auden’s biographer Richard Davenport-Hines writes of this book: “It glows with loving admiration for her generous spirit, fierce sense of vocation, and shameless, irrepressible quirkiness…. Richard Greene is an intelligent, sympathetic writer” (Sunday Telegraph). Anthony Burgess’s biographer Roger Lewis describes it as “Brilliant, wise, funny and affectionate. It is perfection, actually, and I am consumed with professional jealousy” (Daily Mail). He is currently writing a new authorized biography of Graham Greene, commissioned by Little, Brown UK, W. W. Norton, and Knopf Canada.

Robert McGill is an associate professor in the Department of English and the director of its MA program in Creative Writing. His first novel, The Mysteries, was named one of the top five Canadian fiction books of 2004 by Quill & Quire. His second novel, Once We Had a Country, is published by Knopf Canada and by Jonathan Cape in the UK. Robert’s publications also include two nonfiction books, War is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature and The Treacherous Imagination, as well as short fiction in Hazlitt, Toronto Life, The Journey Prize Anthology, Grain, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Descant.

More information about Robert’s writing can be found at robert-mcgill.com.

A. F. Moritz has published more than fifteen books of poetry. His work has earned honours including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and selection to the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He has translated seven books of poetry and a novel from Spanish and French, and in collaboration with Theresa Moritz has written biographies of Emma Goldman and Stephen Leacock, and The Oxford Literary Guide to Canada. He holds a doctorate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry. His The Sentinel (2008) won the 2009 Griffin Prize for poetry. His most recent books are Sequence: A Poem (2015) and the 2015 re-issue by Princeton University Press of his 1986 collection The Tradition. 

Avery Slater holds an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Washington. Her poetry has appeared in Slate Magazine, Poetry London, Literary Imagination, Parnassus, Raritan, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, North American Review, Missouri Review and other journals. Several times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she is also a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize (2007) and is a three-time scholarship alum of Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Her creative work has engaged ecological activism, whether through collaborative work with scientists and artists (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) or through grants for psychogeographic treks to landscapes of industrial damage, such as from the Atkinson Centre for a Sustainable Future to visit and write on toxic chemical spills in West Virginia’s Elk and Kanawha Rivers. These ecopoetic and digital media projects have appeared at venues including the 2015 Venice Biennale / AQUAE Venezia. She co-curated the SOON reading series in experimental poetry in Ithaca, New York while completing her Ph.D. in English at Cornell University, and she is also interested in the theory and practice of literary translation.

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the ReLit Award-winning author of three books of poetry, Fauxccasional Poems (icehouse 2015), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010), Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press 2014). Online, he runs the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project (bit.ly/fauxpoemvid), and he delivered the TEDx talk, “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BUYzMypi8). Tysdal’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays, and has earned him awards including honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards (2003), the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006), the Matrix Lit Pop Award (2010), and the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence (2014). He is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2012, the UTSC student newspaper, The Underground, named him one of their four “Professors of the Year.” 

Ian Williams is the author of six acclaimed books. His latest book, Word Problems, a poetry collection considers the ethical and political issues of our time as math and grammar problems. His novel, Reproduction, won of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award for the best work of global fiction. Reproduction was published in Canada, the US, and the UK, and translated into Italian. In fall 2021, he will publish Disorientation, a linked essay collection on race.
His poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. CBC named him as one of ten Canadian writers to watch. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Professor Williams formerly taught poetry in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. and was Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program.

Emeriti Faculty Biographies

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