Creative Writing Plenary
2027 Hewitt Bostock Lecture | A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki, moderated by Janice Ho
Biography
Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, novelist, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her novels have been published internationally and have garnered acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.
Her first novel, My Year of Meats, garnered widespread glowing reviews, awards, and a still-growing readership. A sexy, poignant, funny tale about global meat and media production, My Year of Meats tells the story of Jane and Akiko, two women on opposite sides of the planet, whose lives are connected by a TV cooking show. Her second novel, All Over Creation shifts the focus from meat to potatoes in a story of a family farmer, his prodigal daughter, an itinerant gang of environmental activists, and a New Age corporate spin doctor, whose lives and interests collide in Liberty Falls, Idaho. Ruth Ozeki’s next novel, A Tale for the Time Being, an instant New York Times bestseller list, is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story about the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, the 2022 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a brilliantly inventive new story about a boy who hears the voices of objects all around him and a mother drowning in her possessions.
Ruth Ozeki currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia.
Moderator
Janice Ho is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, and is currently serving as the Vice President of the Society for Novel Studies.
Registration for the public will open on 15 April 2027.
This event is co-sponsored by the Hewitt Bostock Lecturership at Green College, UBC.
Scholarly Plenary
Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago
Biography
Josephine McDonagh is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the College, University of Chicago, and Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies. She is author of several books, most recently, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (2021), and co-editor of titles including Commodities and Cultures in the Colonial World (2017). With Hadji Bakara and Charlotte Sussman, she is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration (for 2027). Her current work thinks about children and migration, and the persistence of figures of displaced children within print cultures of the nineteenth century and their 20th and 21st-century legacies.
Roundtable Plenary
Geographies of Race and Empire in the Pacific North West
Wayde Compton
Wayde Compton is the author of six books. His short story collection, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. In 2026 he was the honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society. Compton teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. His most recent book is Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (U of Alberta P, 2024).
Christopher Lee
Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English Language and Literatures and a faculty affiliate in the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature and he recently co-edited a special issue of American Quarterly on “From Anarchy to Chaos: Generations of Empire.” His current research focuses on contemporary Chinese Canadian historical narratives and Asian Canadian visual cultures. He received a Killam Research Prize in 2015.
Stephanie LeMenager
Stephanie LeMenager is Professor in English and Affiliate Faculty of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. She held the Moore Chair in English from 2014-2024. Prof. LeMenager is author of several books, including Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Her work on climate change and the humanities has been featured in The New York Times, ClimateWire, Science Friday, NPR, the CBC, and other public venues.
Beth Piatote
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she specializes in Native American/Indigenous literature and law; Nez Perce language and literature, and Indigenous language revitalization; and creative writing. Her books include the scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), and the creative works The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), Antíkoni (produced 2024); and distant water: poems (Milkweed 2026), and numerous works in scholarly and literary journals and anthologies. She is Nez Perce, enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.