Late Fall Writers Residency Online 2023

Moez Surani's writing has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Best Canadian Poetry, and the Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and he has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, and at MacDowell in the United States. His visual and performance works have been shown in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille, Nuit Blanche, Red Head Gallery, Gallery 44, and YYZ Artists' Outlet, and internationally at WhiteBox in New York, the Cross Gallery in Taipei, the New Zero Arts Space in Yangon, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Centre. He is the author of four poetry books: Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009), Floating Life (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), Operations (Book*hug, 2016), and Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real (Book*hug, 2019). His debut novel, The Legend of Baraffo, will be published by Book*hug in 2023. He is currently collaborating with Nina Leo on a collection of installation work, which includes “Lullabies for a Waning Empire”, “Summa”, and the custom scent work “Heresies”.

Klara du Plessis is a poet, scholar, and literary curator. Her debut translingual poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and her book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film, composed by Jimmie LeBlanc, and premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), 2023. A book of essays, I’mpossible collab, and a collaborative poetry collection, G, composed with Khashayar Mohammadi in English, Afrikaans, and Persian, are both forthcoming Fall 2023. Klara develops a curatorial project of poetry in performance called Deep Curation. This approach places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward the poetic product as artwork. In this capacity, she has worked with an amazing array of poets, most recently, Alexei Perry Cox and Kama La Mackerel. Klara holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University. Her current interdisciplinary research focuses on twentieth century and contemporary Canadian poetry and thinks critically about the often neglected labour that goes into shaping poetry reading series, whether live or in the audio archive.