For one term each academic year, the Department of English welcomes a writer in residence to engage in a range of literary events and to offer advice and mentorship to creative writing students. The program was initiated by Carolyn Smart in 2006 and featured, in that year, renowned dub poet Lillian Allen. Since that time, Queen’s has hosted a diverse array of literary artists working across genres and media.
Nancy Jo Cullen’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Ex-Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Event Magazine, Grain, filling Station, Plenitude, Prairie Fire, Arc, This Magazine, Room, The Journey Prize, Best Canadian Fiction 2012, Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2024. She is the 2010 recipient for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. Her most recent collection of poetry, Nothing Will Save Your Life, was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2022. She’s published three collections of poetry with Frontenac House and a collection of short stories, Canary, with Biblioasis. Her first novel, The Western Alienation Merit Badge, was short-listed for the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Dish, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn. She is finishing a fifth collection of poetry and in the early stages of a new novel.
Office hours: Mondays & Thursdays
Office: Watson Hall 432
Email: njc6@queensu.ca
Nothing Will Save Your Life is an explosion of pop culture, femininity, sex, religion and motherhood held together with humour and lightened with fragments of joy. In this book Nancy Jo Cullen has created a collection that is deeply rooted in the messy day-to-day of life but takes on serious issues such as body image, aging, climate change, capitalism and even death – containing it all within traditional poetic forms. From kitten videos to confirmation bias to cucumber diets to vintage Vivienne Westwood, these poems are a whirlwind of constrained energy. Sometimes neurotic, sometimes bawdy, sometimes tender – they are always irresistible to the reader, drawing us deep into Cullen’s world where she pulls apart society to show us just what it is to be alive in this moment.
(Wolsak & Winn, 2022)
Set in Calgary in 1982, during the recession that arrived on the heels of Canada’s National Energy Program, The Western Alienation Merit Badge follows the Murray family as they struggle with grief and find themselves on the brink of financial ruin. After the death of her stepmother, Frances “Frankie” Murray returns to Calgary to help her father, Jimmy, and her sister, Bernadette, pay the mortgage on the family home. When Robyn, a long-lost friend, becomes their house guest old tensions are reignited and Jimmy, Bernadette and Frances find themselves increasingly alienated from one another.
Part family drama, part queer coming-of-age story, The Western Alienation Merit Badge explores the complex dynamics of a small family falling apart.
(Wolsak & Winn, 2019)
Omar El Akkad, former Creative Writing student with the Department of English at Queen’s University, is an author and a journalist. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and investigative journalism. From Afghanistan, to Guantánamo Bay and many other locations in the world, Akkad’s writing and field journailism spans across many complex geographies. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines.
His books include What Strange Paradise (fiction, novel, 2021) and debut novel American War (2018) which is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages.
His debut novel won many prestigious awards including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards.
It was also listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
Omar El Akkad In Conversation with Grace O'Connell and Moez Surani:
Watch Omar discuss memoir with Elamin Abdelmahmoud:
Watch the 2022 Giller Prize Event Featuring Omar:
Maroon Time: Time and Ancestry in the Poem
Kaie Kellough
Kaie Kellough and Armand Ruffo in conversation
Kaie Kellough in conversation with Souvankham Thammavongsa (March 5, 2021)
Learn more about our Scotiabank Giller Prize event…
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo and Dani Spinosa
Moderated by Kaie Kellough (March 16, 2021)
Watson Hall
49 Bader Lane
Kingston ON K7L 3N6
Canada
Queen's University is situated on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory.
