Centre for Contemporary Writing
听
The Centre for Contemporary Writing is a practitioner-led research hub, a meeting place, and an archive for research-creation practices focused on innovative and interdisciplinary forms of writing. The Centre houses Doctoral and Postdoctoral Affiliates, hosts workshops, and runs a small-scall publishing program and imprint, COMMUNIQU脡.
Following extant models, such as the Centre for Contemporary Writing at Queen Mary University in London, UK, and the Kelly Writers鈥� House at the University of Pennsylvania, H漫画鈥檚 Centre for Contemporary Writing is the first arts-focused research centre at H漫画 University. As such, its aim is to support faculty and practitioners working in this area.
Meet our Director, Associate Directors, and Affiliates
Dr. Erin Wunker - Director
Email: ErinWunker@Dal.Ca
Dr. Erin Wunker is a writer, teacher, and researcher in the Department of English in Mik鈥檓a鈥檏i/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her work operates from an intersectional feminist perspective and is invested in affect theory and modes of creative non-fiction. She is the author of All the Waking Hours (Assembly Press, 2026), Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (Book*hug, 2016), and The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Canadian Poetry (Routledge, 2022). All the Waking Hours: Essays will be published by Assembly Press in fall of 2026. She is the editor of Barking & Biting: Selected Poems of Sina Queyras (LPS, 2015). With Bart Vautour, Travis Mason, and Christl Verduyn she edited Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics (WLUP, 2015). With Hannah McGregor and Julie Rak she edited Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug, 2018). With Genevi猫ve Robichaud and Sina Queyras she edited Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House, 2020). She is currently Chair of the Department of English.
Asha Jeffers - Associate Director
Email: asha.jeffers@dal.ca
Dr. Asha Jeffers is a scholar and creative writer originally from Toronto who lives and works in Halifax. Her poetry chapbook Mundane, Majestic was published by Anstruther Press in 2021. She is the author of Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States and the co-editor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study. Her academic and creative writing also appears in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Feminist Encounters, Canadian Literature, South Asian Review, Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy, Critical Insights, The Angle, and The Puritan. Her poetry was selected for the Nova Scotia Writers鈥� Federation鈥檚 Poetry in Motion public poetry project in 2020. Her poem 鈥淯npassing鈥� was published by Opaat Press as a pamphlet in 2025. She is an Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women鈥檚 Studies at H漫画 University.
Dr. Eric Schmaltz - Associate Director
Email: ens@dal.ca
Dr. Eric Schmaltz is a scholar, artist, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English who works with the semantic and somatic registers of language and inscription. He works between and across media, including book-length works, prints, 3D printed sculptures, sound works for acetate discs and cassettes, improvised sound works, and other audio and visual collaborations, which have appeared nationally and internationally. He is the author of lyric-conceptual and conceptual books of poetry I Confess (Coach House Books) and Surfaces (Invisible Publishing) and the academic monograph Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press). He is editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks) and We Have Seasonal Bodies: The Poetry of Gerry Shikatani (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (University of Calgary Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ASAP/Review, Jacket2, The Capilano Review, The Miramirchi Reader, The H漫画 Review, Best American Experimental Writing: 2020, Canadian Literature, and various edited collections. Schmaltz is currently writing a series of SSHRC-funded literary audio essays and The Routledge Handbook for Experimental and Avant-Garde Writing. With Bart Vautour, he co-edits Communiqu茅, the publishing imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Writing.
Dr. Bart Vautour - Associate Director
Email: bart.vautour@dal.ca
Dr. Bart Vautour is a writer, editor, researcher, and teacher in the Department of English. His work examines the multiple lives of texts through both creative and critical approaches. He is the editor of The H漫画 Review. In 2019 he published a collection of poems, The Truth H漫画 Facts, and his novel, Strewnfields, will be published in 2027. His scholarly research examines Canadian cultural production with a focus on transnationalism, modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics (WLUP, 2015) and co-editor of Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media (UTP, 2017). With Emily Robins Sharpe, he has produced the Canada and the Spanish Civil War Series of scholarly editions, including Canada and the Spanish Civil War: An Anthology (UOP/PUO, 2026), which brings together a selection of diverse literary materials鈥攆iction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing鈥攔epresenting just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. With Invisible Books, he is the editor of the Throwback Series, which seeks to give second lives to otherwise out-of-print Canadian texts. With Eric Schmaltz, he co-edits Communiqu茅, the publishing imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Writing.