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New King’s MFA mentors announced

New King's MFA mentors announced

The University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction program is delighted to announce that Carol Shaben and Kelly S. Thompson have joined the program as nonfiction mentors.

Carol Shaben is an award-winning author and journalist. Her first book, Into the Abyss, was a national bestseller and won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction. It was also selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and an Amazon.com Book of the Month.

Carol Shaben

Carol Shaben

Carol’s most recent book, The Marriott Cell, co-written with Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, was long-listed for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize, named one of The Globe & Mail’s 100 Best Books of the Year and won the Ontario Historical Society Huguenot Award. Both books have been optioned for film and shortlisted for BC Book Prizes. Carol is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards including a Gold Medal for Investigative Journalism and was nominated for Best New Magazine Writer. She is a Faculty Editor for the Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism Program and teaches in the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.

Dr. Kelly S. Thompson

Dr. Kelly S. Thompson

Dr. Kelly S. Thompson is a retired military officer who studied Professional Writing at York University, has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, a certificate in Publishing from Ryerson, and a Ph.D. in Literary and Critical Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Gloucestershire, where her research centred on memoir and representations of grief and trauma. She has taught creative writing within a broad range of venues, organizations, age groups, and genres. Kelly won the Anansi Press Golden Anniversary Award for fiction, the 2014 and 2017 Barbara Novak Award for Personal Essay, and was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction prize in 2021. Her essays have appeared in literary magazines, trade publications, and anthologies, as well as publications such as Chatelaine, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and more. Her memoir, Girls Need Not Apply: Field Notes from the Forces, was an instant Globe and Mail bestseller and was listed as one of the top 100 Books of 2019. Her next memoir will release with McClelland & Stewart in January 2023.

Carol and Kelly join King’s MFA mentors Cooper Lee Bombardier, Charlotte Gill, David Hayes, Lezlie Lowe, Lori A. May, Ken McGoogan, Omar Mouallem, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Wanda Taylor, Harry Thurston, Ayelet Tsabari and Gillian Turnbull, under the supervision of cohort directors Dean Jobb and Stephen Kimber and MFA executive director Kim Pittaway.

The MFA in Creative Nonfiction program is a limited residency, two-year program where students deepen their understanding of the art and craft of nonfiction writing through lectures, seminars, panels, workshops and readings as well as working intensively on their own projects with their mentors. The program involves two in-person residencies in Halifax and two online residencies featuring agents, editors, publishers and authors based in Toronto, New York and elsewhere. Find out more at ukings.ca/mfa.


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