Klara du Plessis

Klara du Plessis is a poet, artist-scholar, and literary curator. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and her critical writing received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award. Fall 2023, she releases a book of essays, I’mpossible collab, and a collaborative poetry collection, G, composed with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi in English, Afrikaans, and Persian. Incipit. Scree. Explicit (2023), a sculptural artist’s book, produced in collaboration with the U.K.-based artist Kadie Salmon, was exhibited at Artexte, Montreal; this work, along with a new sound and video installation, is currently touring to the Gallery at Glen Carlou, Cape Town. Since 2018, 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 contemporary poets, including Liz Howard, Kaie Kellough, and Kama La Mackerel, among others. Klara du Plessis also holds a PhD in English Literature and lives in Montreal.