Writer/Multimedia Artist-Performer/Academic

thom is a writer, multimedia artist/performer, and academic. His latest novel, I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley, takes on the lengths people go to erase themselves to matter (Guernica Editions 2024). Shannon Webb-Campbell writes that the book is “Wildly audacious. Hilarious yet devastating. Punchy and raw…. the story leaps off the page….Sex and death drive the novel — as they do in real life — which is ballsy like the novel itself” (The Fiddlehead). Read testimonials and reviews of his first novel The Drifts (Coach House 2010). In June 2025, he will return to the annual conference of ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) to present on catastrophe as a generative tool for creative writers and scholars. He is the guest editor of the Summer 2025 American Book Review special issue on failure and, along with Lucas Crawford, co-editing the upcoming anthology Monosyllabic Queer Theory (currently under peer-review). In 2023, his essay “The Plague Came With No Directions” (The New Quarterly Fall 2022) won a National Magazine Award and the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Prize. thom regularly contributes scholarly work to academic conferences and publications. That same year, he presented on a panel he convened at the 2023 Modern Language Association (MLA) conference: Disrupting Failure: Perspectives on Literary Aesthetics, Structure, and the Collapse of Intention. His ongoing research-creation and knowledge-mobilization activities include using traditional cinematic and extended reality techniques to theorize and practice transmuting sites of stigma into those of agency, empowerment, and connection, finishing his next novel on the queer exile of Walter Benjamin’s fictional great-great grandson, and an edited collection of essays on failure.

A dedicated teacher, he seeks to help artists and others to uncover their unique contributions. His students write, direct, and produce film, TV, and theatre. They have published widely also placing in major international writing competitions. Many are forging professional writing and performance careers. More than a few have gone on to Oxford, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, Loyola, and other important film and media programs.

Currently, thom is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English at Thompson Rivers University. He is a former SSHRC postdoctoral fellow, Vanier Doctoral Scholar, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) award winner, Dr. William S. Lewis Doctoral Fellow, and Magee Doctoral Fellow. He has a long history as a professional actor (The Fugitive, Seinfeld, Grace Under Fire, General Hospital, Saving Hope).  A bio is here.

If you would like to be coached or work with thom, consider the private Writers’ Circle TO.

 

thom vernon actor

A Media Packet is available.

 and @writerscircleto