Erina Harris, PhD, MFA, BA

About

INSTRUCTION:

I teach the following range of courses:

Creative Writing (all Undergraduate levels in genres of Poetry, Creative Nonfiction and Fiction), Introductory Writing and Research courses such as ENGL 103 (Research Methods - Theme: Sociopolitical Analysis of Toys and Play), additional "Laboratory-style" courses  at all Undergraduate levels pairing literary studies, writing, and studies of critical theory such as ENGL 220: Introduction to Gender and Sexuality/ies: A Poetics, and ENGL 409: Sociopolitical Studies of TOYS and Play.

EDUCATION:

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship - "Social Poetics and De-colonial Pedagogy" - University of Alberta 

Ph.D. English and Creative Writing, University of Calgary (SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, and Frances Spratt Graduate Fellowship at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities)

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

Honours B.A. English, University of Waterloo

PEDAGOGY: CLASSROOM COMMUNITIES and LABORATORIES

FOUNDATIONS: My teaching practice is informed by studies and mentorship with teachers, artists, and Knowledge Keepers. I work to engage anti-discriminatory pedagogy (via 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.

PRACTICES: In all courses, we begin with the development of our "Class Manifesto" as part of creating the parameters (discourse, respect, dreaming) for each classroom community. As a class, we discuss our vision of accountable citizenship in our class-world, and then hold ourselves accountable to this by checking in on our collective Manifesto and ourselves, as we go.

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

LANGUAGES: courses are taught in English; all courses include a cross-cultural selection of works in translation, including Creative Writing courses. Creative Writing courses foster trans-lingual approaches as well as the creation of multi-lingual writings.

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

ASPIRATIONS: In all courses, both creative and scholarly, I work with students to establish and nurture your own goals and self-empowerment. All courses are student-centered and discussion-based.

The instruction of Creative Writing in our LABORATORIES 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 within the contexts of intersectionality. 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 work within Trauma-informed Workshop frameworks.

PRINCIPLES: 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 recently (2025) at the HANGAR Residency, Lisbon, Portugal. There, I initiated a research-creation project: I studied the Doll Hospital Bonecas (the oldest functioning doll hospital in the world since 1830) through the framework of ecological ethics/recycling, and also began research on its founder Dona Carlota, through the lens of intersectional feminism.

BOOKS:

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

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

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

TEACHING AWARDS - Distinctions for "Ethical" and "Innovative" Instruction of Creative Writing and Literature:

* University of Alberta Faculty of Arts Excellence in Indigenization, Access, Community, Belonging, & Decolonization (I and ACB & D)/EDID Initiatives in Teaching Award (2026)

* 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. 

Recently, I served as Poetry Editor for the multilingual poetry collection Waiting in the Land of the Living by Medgine Mathurin, Polyglot Press, Edmonton.

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

WRITING and RESEARCH-CREATION:

My research-creation and teaching practices are interpenetrative. My 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, 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. Sociopolitical studies of: "imagination," toys (puppets, dolls, video games), and monsters (Monster Theory).

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 220 - Reading Gender and Sexuality

An introduction to dynamics of gender and sexuality in literary and other cultural texts, and to the critical concepts and methods key to their study. Prerequisite: 6 units of junior ENGL, or 3 units of junior ENGL and 3 units of junior WRS.

WRITE 294 - Introduction to Writing Poetry

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

WRITE 295 - Introduction to Writing Fiction

Lectures and workshops in which the student will practice the craft of short prose fiction.

WRITE 392 - Intermediate Poetry

Lectures and workshops focusing on selected poetic technique and form. Prerequisite: WRITE 294 unless waived by Instructor; a minimum grade of B+ in the prerequisite course is strongly recommended.

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