Poet Cecily Nicholson will deliver the seventh Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture on September 23 at UBC Okanagan. (Jef Clarke photo)
Who: Poet Cecily Nicholson
What: Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture: “Practical Room for Poetic Imagination”
Where: Online via Zoom
When: Wednesday, September 23 at 7 pm
Poet Cecily Nicholson has taught inside prisons, in community arts spaces and in university classrooms across the Pacific Northwest. What she has learned in those rooms is the subject of her lecture at UBC Okanagan this month.
Nicholson, a Governor General’s Literary Award winner who teaches at UBC Vancouver’s School of Creative Writing, will deliver the seventh Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture on September 23.
The audience will watch the live broadcast from the Corbishley Family Reading Room at UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives (OSC), located in The Commons building.
“Drawing on my 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,” she says.
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.
Nicholson was also the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. She volunteers with communities affected by the prison system and food insecurity. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, considers the daily movement of crows.
“Sharon Thesen’s work and presence are influential across generations of writers on the West Coast, in Canada and beyond. I am honoured and delighted to share in the legacy of the Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture,” Nicholson adds.
“We are thrilled to welcome, Cecily Nicholson, one of the most distinguished poets working within Canada, and a writer whose innovations in lyric poetry are kindred with Sharon Thesen’s,” says Matthew Rader, Creative Writing Program Coordinator in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies.
This year will also mark the launch of the Sharon Thesen Lecture Chapbook Series, which will make the lectures available in print for the first time. The chapbook series will begin with Kevin Chong’s 2021 lecture, “In the Middle of It All.”
Chong is a Giller Prize-shortlisted author and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan. The chapbooks are limited edition, hand-sewn risographs printed by tooth brush books.
Thesen, a renowned Canadian poet and editor, was the first full professor in UBCO’s Department of Creative Studies and is now a UBC professor emerita. This lecture series is a way to acknowledge Thesen’s contributions to British Columbian and Canadian literature and to UBCO’s creative writing program. In her honour, each year a different writer gives a lecture that tackles key issues of contemporary writing, poetics and Canadian literature.
A selection of publications in OSC’s holdings by Thesen and other writers from UBCO will be on display as a backdrop to this year’s lecture.
The public is invited to view the exhibition starting in October. OSC will be open for walk-ins starting in October, Monday to Thursday, from 11 am to 3 pm, or by appointment. Please email osc-contact@lists.ubc.ca.
To register for the September 23 event or learn more about the Sharon Thesen Lecture Series, visit fccs.ok.ubc.ca/authors
