Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture: Practical Room for Poetic Imagination
September 23 at 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Free
Sharon Thesen was the first full professor in the Department of Creative Studies and is now a professor emerita at UBC Okanagan. She is also a renowned Canadian poet and editor. The creative writing program at UBC intends for the Sharon Thesen lecture to acknowledge her contributions to British Columbian and Canadian literature and to the Creative Writing Program at UBC Okanagan. In her honour, a different writer each year will give a lecture that tackles key issues of contemporary writing, poetics, and Canadian literature. By recording each lecture, we will create a wonderful resource of contemporary thinking by writers. Cecily Nicholson will present the seventh Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture.
Cecily Nicholson is a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and the inaugural Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading Award. Nicholson held the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley and teaches in the School of Creative Writing at UBC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, considers the daily movement of crows.
Practical Room for Poetic Imagination with Cecily Nicholson
The second tenet of the Poetry for the People program, officially established in 1991 by the late UC Berkeley professor June Jordan, is that “words can change the world and save our lives.” Drawing on her experience teaching in carceral, community arts, as well as university spaces in the Pacific Northwest, this talk takes up a liberational genealogy of the “workshop” alongside current reflections on the poetry of witness and correspondence.
Participants Cecily Nicholson and Sharon Thesen will be present in the UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives. As space is limited, the public is invited to attend this event virtually.
