Catherine Black

Catherine Black is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Creative Writing BFA program at OCAD University. She was also instrumental in the development of both the Creative Writing minor at OCADU and the BFA Creative Writing program: a multi-faceted, transdisciplinary program that launched in September 2019. Catherine was awarded the Price Award for Leadership in Teaching in 2023.

Catherine’s first collection of prose poetry, Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, was the second book in Guernica Edition’s “First Poets Series,” and her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Thread, was nominated for the ReLit award. Her third book, a collection of prose poems entitled Bewilderness, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Catherine's debut novel, Blessed Nowhere, was awarded the Guernica Prize for Literary fiction and will be published in November, 2024. Her chapter on fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in art and design education is forthcoming in the anthology, Teaching Creative Writing in Canada (Routledge).

Broadly speaking, Catherine’s areas of interest and expertise in creative writing include experimentations in prose poetry and other hybrid forms such as the lyric essay and longer experimental fiction. Thematically, her work interrogates the reliability of memory, the intersections of imagination and reality, as well as issues of motherhood, mental health and grief. Catherine has recently begun to explore ways in which her writing might span media, through guerrilla poetry projects, video essays and literary objects.