Klara du Plessis

Klara du Plessis is a FRQSC-funded, final-year PhD candidate at Concordia University, and is affiliated with the SpokenWeb research network. An interdisciplinary project straddling English literature, curatorial studies, and performance, her doctoral work aims to schematize different modes of literary event curation and to think critically about the often-neglected labour that goes into shaping poetry reading series, whether live or in the audio archive. Her research focuses on twentieth century and contemporary Canadian poetry, and develops a research creation component called Deep Curation, an approach that places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward the poetic product. In this capacity, she has worked with an amazing array of poets, including Alexei Perry Cox and Kama La Mackerel. Klara is the author of Ekke (Palimpsest, 2018; winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award) and Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest, 2020) and has also edited a book of experimental criticism based on transcription and citation with SpokenWeb and in collaboration with Emma Telaro called Quotes: Transcriptions on Listening, Sound, Agency.