Melissa Jacques is an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia. Cross-appointed in English and Cultural Studies and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, she teaches writing, critical poetics, critical theory, and popular culture across both departments. Her research focuses on the relationship between politics and aesthetics in representations of trauma. She is especially interested in texts that mix text and image, and in life writing that refuses the narrative conventions of autobiography. Her personal essay ‘Call and Response’ won the inaugural Open Season Award for non-fiction at the Malahat Review.
‘Metastases’ is a personal essay about the death of a sibling in the midst of a global pandemic. Through a mix of memory and theoretical meditation, it explores the distance at the heart of shared experience and the transformative potential of grief.