Erina Harris, PhD, MFA, BA

About

EDUCATION:

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship (Poetics and Pedagogy), University of Alberta 

Ph.D. English and Creative Writing, University of Calgary (SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship)

M.F.A. Creative Writing, Poetry, Iowa Writers' Workshop and Workshop Teaching Fellowship Award

Honours B.A. English, University of Waterloo

PEDAGOGY:

My teaching practice is informed by studies with, and mentorship from teachers, artists, and Knowledge Keepers. I work to engage anti-discriminatory, feminist, queer, and de-colonial pedagogical methodologies. To borrow the insights of bell hooks, I too believe that "the classroom" can be a site of "radical possibility" as well as compassion, discovery, and creativity. To my mind, teaching and writing are vital life-long practices hence, I am forever a student.

In all courses, we begin with a facilitation/development of our "Class Manifesto" as part of creating the parameters (discourse, respect, dreaming) for each classroom community.

All Syllabi include works by creators from diverse cultural backgrounds, identity positions, abilities, and epistemologies, including works in translation - all across genres and aesthetics. Students will be assigned readings across literary/historical periods (time travel!) and representative of divergent worldviews. All Syllabi will meaningfully engage creations by BIPOC, disabled, LGBTQ2S+ and settler writers/artists.

All courses include anonymous student mid-way evaluations; I invite student input towards finalizing course reading lists.

In all courses, both creative and scholarly, I work with students to nurture your own goals and self-empowerment. 

In the instruction of Creative Writing, coursework involves technical skill-building, embodied close reading and listening. The risk of "experimentation" or the "poetics of uncertainty" will become a regular part of our creative practice. For Creative Writing courses, "experiments" are graded solely based on completion, as part of fostering writing Towards the Unknown. Both creative and scholarly courses engage multi-media texts and artworks, and extra-canonical inventions (for example: chapbooks, social/performative poetics, "lyric" and "experimental" poetries). Syllabi include writings (artistic, theoretical, hybrid) by established and under-represented voices. Literary forms/aesthetics are considered critically, in the context of intersectionality and dominant ideologies. Creative Writing students will spend a significant amount of time creating, in addition to developing the practice of the rigorous and respectful critique as part of skill-building + community-building.

I teach within the framework of inclusive discussion-based, student-centred classrooms. 

I work to be aware and pro-active regarding power inequities in the classroom and beyond.

I adore my work in this field: what a captivating way to engage the brief honour of human consciousness, with and towards one another.

PUBLICATIONS and AWARDS:

Creative Writing -  hybrid projects: poetics, adaptation, creative non-fiction -  published and reviewed in North America and in Europe, also published in translation.

My published work has been awarded numerous prizes, grants, short-listings and nominations including SSHRC Doctoral/CGS and Post-Doctoral Fellowship Awards. 

In June 2024, I received the Lieutenant Governor General of Alberta Emerging Artist Award for accomplishments and contributions as writer and mentor: 

https://artsawards.ca/artist/erina-harris/

I have been awarded multiple international writers' residencies (Slovenia, Austria, Canada) and upcoming in 2025 at the HANGAR Residency, Lisbon, Portugal where I will study the Doll Hospital Bonecas (the oldest functioning doll hospital in the world since 1830) and its founder Dona Carlota.

Books -

The Stag Head Spoke, Buckrider Books, 2014 (Poetry. *Short-listed for the Canadian Authors' Association Poetry Award)

Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, Buckrider Books, 2024 (Hybrid poetics, lyric essays) 

Persephone's Debt: An Alphabet Play - an unorthodox adaptation of the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter" (accepted for publication, birthday TBA)

Teaching -  numerous distinctions for "ethical" and "innovative" teaching:

* University of Alberta Academic Teaching Staff Teaching Award (2025)

* University of Alberta William Hardy Alexander Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2025)

*CCWWP (Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs) Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovation in the Instruction of Creative Writing 

*University of Calgary Distinguished Teaching recognition

*Iowa Writers' Workshop Distinguished Teaching recognition (twice student-nominated)

*Iowa Writers' Workshop Teaching Fellowship Award

Editing - I serve as Editor to writers at all stages of their craft - poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction.

For a complete list of awards, prizes, nominations, publications, please visit: www.erinaharris.com

Be welcome to contact me with inquiries. It will be grand to have you in our class.

Research

Research-Creation:

My research-creation and teaching practices are interpenetrative. My published work engages the following concerns:

ethics (including questions about the creation of increasingly compassionate human communities and communities with our ecological "others"/ecological ethics); feminism, social justice, and de-centering whiteness; subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and relationality (not so much the rationalist questioning of "what is a self?" rather, the questioning of  which models of selfhood or subjectivity, apart from Western Cartesian subjectivity, are more generous, accurate, sustainable?"); theories of performance and play, gender (the construction of hegemonic femininity and masculinity, orientations and expressions of queerness and fluidities); women's writing/feminist poetics; experimentalism/avant-gardism, nonsense verse (nonsense as a critique of sense), rhyme (as a metaphysics of, paradoxically both resemblance and otherness), trauma narratives (the relationship between language/storytelling and identity-building, mourning), Indigeneity and Indigenous-settler relations (histories and possibilities), popular oral storytelling forms such as fairy tales and nursery rhymes. And monsters, dolls, and socio-political studies of toys!

My work and teaching engage an array of critical theories or, in the words of writer-scholar Larissa Lai: "Who is this resistance speaking to? A new, desired relation."

ENGL 103 - Case Studies in Research

This variable content course introduces methods of literary research as an in-depth process through one or more case studies. Refer to the Class Schedule and the Department of English and Film Studies website for specific topics. This course cannot be repeated for credit. Note: Not to be taken by students with 6 units in approved junior English.

ENGL 409 - Studies in Literary Periods and Cultural Movements

Prerequisites: 12 units of senior ENGL with a minimum of 6 units at the 300 level. Note: variable content course which may be repeated.

WRITE 294 - Introduction to Writing Poetry

Lectures and workshops in which the student will practice the art of poetry.

WRITE 297 - Introduction to Writing Nonfiction

To increase the student's ability to write clear nonfiction prose. Models of prose style are central, combined with frequent practice in writing on the basis of such models. Prerequisite: 3 of junior units English (or equivalent). Not to be taken by students with credit in WRITE 298.

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