Creative Writing Diploma
The Diploma in Creative Writing gives students the opportunity to work intensively in a variety of creative genres, such as fiction, poetry, drama, screenwriting, and creative non-fiction. The overall aim of the program is to help students develop vigorous and robust writing practices through a focus on the composition, critiquing, and peer-editing of the students’ own work together with close reading and analyses of models.
The Diploma in Creative Writing is committed to telling the stories of Newfoundland and Labrador alongside Indigenous methods for creative writing. For over forty years, Memorial University Creative Writing courses have offered students a variety of skillsets that translate outside the classroom, into their own writing careers, and their own jobs and lives.
Learn more about the Diploma’s requirements (URL to lower point in webpage) and Sign-up for the Creative Writing at Memorial University Newsletter for details about upcoming course offerings, writing tips & more!
The faculty of the Diploma in Creative Writing are:
• Lisa Moore (author of February, Booker Prize longlist and Canada Reads winner; Invisible Prisons, 2024 BMO Winterset Award Winner). Full Bio
• Michelle Porter (author of A Grandmother Begins the Story, Winner of the 2024 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and Finalist for the 2023 Writers' Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize; Approaching Fire). Full Bio
• Aaron Tucker (author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos, and Catalogue d’Oiseaux). Full Bio
Program of Study
Students are required to complete a minimum of 24 credit hours of course work, selected from the following:
English 2905, 3900, 3901, 3902, 3903, 3904, 4910, 4911, 4912, 4913
With written approval of the Program Coordinator and the Faculty’s Committee on Undergraduate Studies, select other courses may be eligible towards the Diploma credit requirements. This includes special topics courses in creative writing that are offered from time to time, English 4999 when it is completed as a creative writing project, and select courses offered at Grenfell Campus and other institutions.
Program Coordinator
For more information students are invited to contact:
Dr. Aaron Tucker, Program Coordinator
t: 709-864-8060
e: aaron.tucker@mun.ca
o: AA 3029
Faculty
Lisa Moore has written three collections of short stories, four novels, a supernatural novella, and her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and Turkish and published in the territories of United Kingdom and the United States. Lisa's novel February was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won CBC Canada Reads in 2013. She is also the winner of the Writer’s Trust Engel Findley Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Canada/Caribbean region. Something for Everyone won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. In addition, she has written for the stage and television and her numerous creative non-fiction essays have been published in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Brick Magazine, Chatelaine, Cottage Life, The Walrus, Canadian Art and Riddle Fence. She is also the co-librettist for the opera based on February with composer Laura Kaminsky which premiered in St. John's Newfoundland. Most recently, Lisa has also written with Jack Whalen, the creative non-fiction book Invisible Prisons which was short-listed for the Hilary Weston Prize in 2024 and the young adult novel Flannery.
Michelle Porter writes poetry, fiction and, nonfiction. She is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers (the Goulet family) originally from the Red River area. Her first novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story (2023), was the winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She’s the author of two nonfiction books, Approaching Fire and Scratching River, and one book of poetry, Inquiries. Her next novel A Glacier’s Guide to Dying is due to be published in the fall of 2026.
Aaron Tucker is is the author of the novels Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (both with Coach House Books). In addition, he is the author of three books of poetry, Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press), Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan). His latest book Flexible Faces is forthcoming in 2026 with McGill-Queens University Press.