thom is a writer, actor and academic. I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley, his next novel takes on the lengths people go to erase themselves and arrives from Guernica Editions in 2024. His essay “The Plague Came With No Directions” (The New Quarterly, Fall 2022) finds a metaphor for living with HIV & trauma while getting stuck on a mountain in the Pyrenees. ‘Plague’ won a National Magazine Award and the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Prize. thom regularly contributes scholarly work to academic conferences and publications. Most recently, he presented two talks, one on ‘Architecture’ and one on ‘Failure’, as creative writing and teaching methods at the annual conference of Association of Canadian Colleges and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). 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. Read testimonials and reviews of his first novel The Drifts (Coach House 2010).
A dedicated teacher, he seeks to help artists and others to find their unique contributions. His students write, direct, and produce film, TV, and theatre. They have placed in major international writing competitions, had their work optioned, and 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 an A.B.D. Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick. thom is also a Vanier Doctoral Scholar, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) award winner, a Dr. William S. Lewis Doctoral Fellow, and a Magee Doctoral Fellow. He has recently been awarded a SSHRC postdoctoral award to theorize stigma as a creative, critical, and activist tool at York University. A bio is here.