Charlotte Gill has joined the University of King’s College Writing & Publishing program as a Cohort Director in the new MFA in Fiction program. Charlotte will oversee the progress of the incoming Class of 2026 from admission to graduation, working with students and mentors, as well as being part of the Writing & Publishing administrative team.
Charlotte is no stranger to the MFA, having served as a mentor in the Creative Nonfiction stream since 2018. In fact, she will combine new and old roles during the winter semester, mentoring her students in the nonfiction Class of 2024.
“After working with Charlotte as a fellow mentor, I’m thrilled she is moving into the role of Fiction Cohort Director,” says King’s Writing & Publishing Director Gillian Turnbull. “Charlotte is a brilliant author of both fiction and nonfiction, and I have watched her lead our students through some of the most challenging points in their manuscript development. She is a much beloved faculty member, admired by both students and mentors for her gentle, compassionate and conscientious approach to teaching, and for her dazzling skills in storytelling.”
Charlotte is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. In 2005, her short story collection, Ladykiller, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and also won both the Ethel Wilson Fiction BC Book Prize and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of published short fiction in the English language by a Canadian writer.
Her first memoir, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, also won multiple awards, including the 2012 National British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction and the Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize.
Her most recent memoir, Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Memoir was published in 2023.
Charlotte served as the Banff Centre’s Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism from 2019 to 2023 and was the University of Calgary Writer in Residence in 2008–09.
“I’m excited to work closely with Charlotte on new initiatives in the MFA,” Gillian Turnbull says, “and look forward to witnessing her lead the 2026 cohort through the program.”
