Creative Writing Faculty
Elaine Ávila MFA (California Institute of the Arts), BEd (SFU), BA (Santa Clara University) Email: avilag@douglascollege.ca 
| Elaine Ávila’s plays are produced in Panamá City, Sintra, Pico, Costa Rica, Paris, London, New York, Lisbon, Australia, Los Angeles, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria, and include Jane Austen, Action Figure (Best New Play, Festival de los Cocos); Lieutenant Nun (Best New Play, Victoria Critics Circle); Kitimat (Mellon Foundation Commission); Fado: the Saddest Music in the World (Named Top Latinx Plays in U.S, Sure Fire List in Canada, Best Musical); and Café a Brasileira (Best Play, Disquiet International, Lisbon). Her collected works are available from NoPassport Press. Her nonfiction is published by York University Press, Routledge, Theatre Communications Group, Smith and Kraus, EnRoute, Howlround, Canadian Theatre Review, American Theater, Portuguese American Review, Lusitania, Contemporary Theatre Review and Café Onda. She is the co-founder of the International Climate Change Theatre Action, involving 50 playwrights, 200 venues and 12,000 audience members worldwide. She is the Fulbright Scholar to the Azores and lives in New Westminster. |
Elizabeth Bachinsky 
| Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of five collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006), God of Missed Connections (Nightwood Editions, 2009), I Don’t Feel So Good (BookThug, 2012) and The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood Editions, 2013). Her poetry has been nominated for awards including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, the Kobzar Award, the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in BC Literature and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and on film around the world. Her poem “Wolf Lake” is a favourite of Poetry in Voice, Canada’s national poetry recitation competition for youth and her collection God of Missed Connections was adapted for stage by the Electric Company. Elizabeth has taught at UBC, UBCO, The Sage Hill Writing Experience and other schools and is a past editor of EVENT magazine and PRISM international. |
Shashi Bhat MFA (The Johns Hopkins University), BA (Cornell University) 
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Shashi Bhat is the author of the short story collection, Death by a Thousand Cuts (McClelland & Stewart, 2024) and the novels The Most Precious Substance on Earth (M&S, 2021; Grand Central, 2022), a finalist for the Governor General's Award for fiction, and The Family Took Shape (Cormorant, 2013), a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Shashi's fiction won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her stories have appeared in publications across Canada, including Hazlitt, Best Canadian Stories 2018, 2019, and 2021 and The Journey Prize Stories 24 and 30. Shashi is also the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine.
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Amber Dawn Department Chair MFA, BA (UBC) Email: upfolda@douglascollege.ca 
| Amber Dawn is the author of four books and the editor of three anthologies. Her debut novel Sub Rosa (2010) won the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award. Her poetry collection Where the words end and my body begins (2015) was a finalist for BC Book Award’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her sophomore novel Sodom Road Exit (2018) was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Photo credit: Sarah Race. |
Rick Maddocks BA (Guelph), MFA (UBC) Email: maddocksr@douglascollege.ca 
| Rick Maddocks’s collection of linked stories, Sputnik Diner, was published by Knopf/Vintage Canada. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and in such anthologies as Write Turns: New Directions in Canadian Fiction. Rick is also a singer/songwriter, releasing two albums with The Beige. His experimental opera The Meal premiered at the PuSh Festival in 2011 and was restaged in 2012 at Pacific Theatre. His interdisciplinary project, Sun Belt, launched the book/ album Cabalcor in 2015. He’s currently working on a novel and is releasing an album, Songs from the Black Sand, in late 2019. |
Renée Sarojini Saklikar JD (UBC), BA (UBC), Certificate of Creative Writing (SFU) Teaches CRWR 1103, CRWR 1104, CRWR 2203 Email: rsaklika@douglascollege.ca 
| Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the author of five books, including the award-winning Children of Air India and Listening to the Bees. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. Bramah’s Quest is the latest volume of her epic fantasy in verse, THOT J BAP, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns. This speculative fiction/poetry series, known collectively as “The Bramah Books,” features a time-travelling locksmith named Bramah, “brown, brave and beautiful.” Renee Sarojini loves creating Young Adult speculative fiction, (Told Under the Linden Tree, Pulp Literature magazine, No 37, Winter 2023) and is working on a children’s book spin-off series from the Bramah books, Bramah and The Seed Jar (forthcoming Nightwood Editions) for which she received a Canada Council grant. Renee Sarojini was poet laureate for the City of Surrey 2015–2018 and volunteers for EVENT magazine, Meet the Presses collective, Surrey International Writers Conference and Poetry in Canada. Renée Sarojini helps to host Lunch Poems at SFU. Photo credit: Sandra Vander Schaaf. |
FACULTY EMERITUS
Mary Burns Faculty Emerita | Mary Burns is the author of six books, numerous radio and stage plays, documentary film scripts, newspaper and magazine articles. |
Susan McCaslin Faculty Emerita Email: smccaslin@shaw.ca | Susan McCaslin is an established poet with thirteen published volumes of poetry, a volume of essays, and a memoir. She taught poetry workshops in the Creative Writing Department at Douglas College for ten years. She now gives poetry readings and offers occasional creative writing workshops. |
Calvin Wharton Dip Creative Writing (David Thompson), MFA (British Columbia) Email: 
| Calvin Wharton is the Chair of the Creative Writing department. His work has been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies, and broadcast on CBC radio. He has published a book of poetry, Visualized Chemistry (Tsunami Editions), and co-edited the poetry anthology East of Main (Arsenal Pulp) with Tom Wayman. He also wrote the non-fiction Rowing (Stoddart) with Silken Laumann, and a collection of short fiction, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone). He was editor of EVENT magazine from 1996 to 2001. His collection of poetry, The Song Collides (Anvil Press) was published in 2011, and a chapbook, The Invention of Birds, appeared as part of the Alfred Gustav press series in May 2014 |