Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing

David James Brock is a screenwriter, playwright, poet, and opera librettist with national and international production history. He is a past winner of the Herman Voaden Canadian National Playwriting Award for his play Wet, which was also nominated for three Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. His play-opera hybrid, a million billion pieces, premiered at Young People's Theatre in 2019, was nominated for five Dora Mavor Moore Awards, and is published by Playwrights Canada Press. Brock is also the author of two poetry collections, Everyone is CO2 and Ten-Headed Alien, both released by Wolsak & Wynn. He has created opera and song lyrics for over a dozen opera and new music projects. For Scottish Opera, Brock co-created with Gareth Williams Breath Cycle, a multimedia opera developed with cystic fibrosis patients. With Mike Haliechuk, Brock co-wrote Year of the Horse, an opera with Canadian hardcore legends and Polaris Award-winning band F*cked Up. Pitchfork Magazine called the Year of the Horse album "epic...intricate... dramatic..." and the project's feature length screenplay has been optioned. He also co-wrote the screenplay and songs for Mother of All Shows (with Melissa D'Agostino), which won Outstanding Narrative Feature at the 2023 Art of Brooklyn film festival.

Eufemia Fantetti began instructing at Humber in 2014 and has taught creative writing through the University of Guelph-Humber, the International Women’s Writing Guild, the Association of Italian Canadian Writers, Toronto Public Library, The Writer’s Studio at SFU and the University of Guelph’s Open Learning program. 

Her short fiction collection, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love (Mother Tongue Publishing) was runner up for the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and won the 2014 Bressani Prize for Short Fiction. Her second book, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir, was released in 2019. She recently co-edited the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language (Book*hug, 2021) with Leonarda Carranza and Ayelet Tsabari. She is a winner of Event Magazine’s Creative Nonfiction contest, a two-time finalist in the Canadian National Playwriting competition, and a three-time winner of Accenti Magazine’s annual contest. Her writing was listed as Notable Essay through The Best American Essays Series and received Highly Commended in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s Short Story Competition. Her work can be found in various anthologies including Beyond Crazy, Conspicuous Accents, Emails from India, Exploring Voices, Love Me True and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers.

Eufemia holds an MFA in Creative Writing. As the lone writer in a family of mathematicians, and a descendant of many who were never given the opportunity to learn to read and write, she is secure in her belief about the potency of the written word as a tool to empower individuals, establish community and enlarge empathy.

New to Humber College, Kathy Friedman has been teaching creative writing for nearly a decade in the University of Guelph's Open Learning program, and through community organizations such as CAMH, The 519, NISA/Northern Institute for Social Action, Workman Arts, Progress Place, and the Toronto Public Library.

Kathy's debut collection of short stories, All the Shining People(House of Anansi, 2022), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. She has been a finalist for the Writers' Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and her work has appeared in publications such as Grain, Geist, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Humber Literary Review, and Canadian Notes & Queries. She holds an MFA and a BFA in creative writing and is currently at work on a collection of essays about travel, music, and mental health.

Kathy is also a freelance editor and the co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops, which delivers free literary programming to people with mental health and addiction issues. She has published four literary anthologies with in-house imprint InkWell Books, and she edited a fifth InkWell anthology called Brilliance Is the Clothing I Wear (Dundurn Press, 2021).

Leanne Milech has been a professor at Humber since 2016, where she is fortunate to serve as Essays Editor of The Humber Literary Review. Leanne also teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph-Humber and has previously co-facilitated creative writing workshops at CAMH and the Toronto Public Library. 

Before joining Humber, Leanne worked as a corporate lawyer on Bay Street, an estate planning lawyer at a boutique law firm, a cross-border wealth strategist, a legal writer, a ghostwriter of legal texts, and a freelance arts journalist. She was also the co-founder of a children’s book publishing company, Picture It Picture Books, which sold a series of children’s books that Leanne co-wrote. The books were sold in stores across Canada, including Indigo and Mastermind. 

Leanne holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, where she wrote a short story that went on to win the top $10,000 prize in ELQ/Exile’s Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Competition in the Emerging Writer category. Leanne’s work has appeared in The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Globe and Mail; EXILE: The Literary Quarterly; and The Humber Literary Review. She has been shortlisted for Room’s Creative Non-Fiction prize, and as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University, she published short stories in The Queen’s Journal, Ultraviolet, and Other Voices. Before attending law school, Leanne won The Writers’ Union of Canada’s Postcard Story competition and read her piece on CBC’s The Sunday Edition.  

Leanne is currently working on a screenplay and a novel. She lives in Toronto with her fiancée Shannon Alexandra.

Angelo Muredda is a Toronto-based teacher and film critic. His writing has appeared in outlets such as Cinema Scope, The National Post, The Walrus, SHARP Magazine, and Film Freak Central, and he is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association. He holds a Ph.D. in English on representations of disability in Canadian literature and film from the University of Toronto. He teaches in the Department of English at Humber College, where he is also Reviews Editor for the Humber Literary Review. 

Meaghan Strimas is an award-winning educator, writer and editor who joined Humber as a faculty member in 2012. Before accepting her exciting role in the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program, she served as the program co-ordinator for the college’s graduate certificate in Professional Writing & Communications.

Meaghan worked at Quill & Quire magazine for several years as a marketing manager and at the University of Guelph as the program administrator for its Creative Writing MFA. In addition to her work as a professor and co-ordinator, Meaghan works as a freelance proofreader, copy editor and project manager, and is interviews editor at the Humber Literary Review, a magazine she co-founded in 2014. She is co-lead of the HLR Spotlight project, an experiential learning opportunity that is funded by Humber’s Office of Research & Innovation.

Meaghan is the author of three collections of poetry and the editor of The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen. Her most recent collection, Yes or Nope, was the winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In the fall of 2018, she released the Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, which she co-edited with the late Priscila Uppal. Meaghan is at work on a novel and a new collection of poetry, and she has an essay forthcoming in the anthology Good Mom on Paper (edited by Jen Sookfong Lee and Stacey May Fowles).

Meaghan holds a MA in Creative Writing. She believes that writing programs are essential because they cultivate confidence, teach technique and craft, offer mentorship and, perhaps most importantly, provide a space for artistic collaboration and community.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of three novels, including his most recent, Lump (Rare Machines/Dundurn Press, 2023). His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Best Canadian Essays, and elsewhere. He is the host of the author podcast What Happened Next and is the program coordinator for Humber's Creative Book Publishing postgraduate program.

Jessica Duffin Wolfe teaches interactive design and digital storytelling in the Digital Communications, Journalism, and Film degree programs at Humber’s Lakeshore campus. Before joining Humber, she completed a PhD in English, Book History, and Print Culture, and worked as a critic, magazine editor, and web developer. She’s taught previously at OCAD University and the University of Toronto, and is working to develop Humber’s immersive storytelling capacity. You can learn more about her writing and projects at her website: https://jessicaduffinwolfe.com