Crystal Hurdle

Crystal Hurdle (MA, University of Victoria, 1981) teaches English and Creative Writing at Capilano University. In the mid-nineties, she was co-coordinator of the English Department. Hurdle has also taught at the University of Victoria, University of British Columbia and at Simon Fraser University as the Technical Writing Director of the School of Engineering. From the University of Victoria, she obtained a BA (Honours) and an MA in English. She also received a certification for teaching high school students and for teaching English as a Second Language.

Hurdle has facilitated Instructional Skills Workshops at Capilano University, as well as completed facilitators' training and professional development in New Westminster and Naramata.

In October 2007, she was Guest Poet at the International Sylvia Plath Symposium at the University of Oxford, reading from After Ted & Sylvia: Poems. Her work, poetry and prose, has been published in many journals, including Canadian Literature, The Literary Review of Canada, Event, Bogg, Vallum, Transverse, Ars Medica, and The Dalhousie Review. Teachers Pets, a teen novel in verse, was published in 2014.

Teaching Interests

I love to teach inductively, pulling from students delights that they already know. I've taught teachers, engineers and engineering students, writers, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. I've used collaborative learning/writing in many forms. I fell in love with American poet Sylvia Plath in a Freshman Literature course. On smeary mimeograph paper were "Lady Lazarus" and "Tulips." 'Who is this woman?' I asked then and have attempted to answer ever since. Seeing Ted Hughes at a rare reading in Vancouver, BC in the early nineties, I became increasingly fascinated about the pair. In my students, I encourage the passion and curiousity that I felt as a student and continue to feel.