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Jessica Bebenek is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She thinks a lot about empathy, death, witchcraft, gendered labour, slow time, anarchism, decolonization, chronic illness, capitalism, waste, reproduction, and all their intersections.

Bebenek’s writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her seventh poetry chapbook, I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM, was released by Gap Riot Press (2022) and her first full collection of poetry, No One Knows Us There, will be released by Book*hug Press in Spring 2025.

k2tog, her collection of knitting patterns for poems, was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press (2018) and her 12-hour knitting performance, “The Waste Land”, investigating gendered labour & the English canon, was featured at Toronto's Nuit Blanche (2017). She continues her public knitting performances through her ongoing durational performance, “Rag Bag”, in which she is knitting all 116 of Ezra Pound's cantos.

As a bookmaker, Bebenek learned the ropes while running her Tkaron:to/Toronto-based micro-press Grow & Grow which published innovative chapbooks of poetry, prose, and visual art by emerging writers from 2012-2014. She now creates one-of-a-kind, fine art notebooks made entirely from reclaimed materials, while working as a freelance book designer, printer, and binder. Since 2015, Bebenek has served as Risograph Coordinator at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics where she teaches and offers free risograph printing on collaborative projects with local writers, artists, and students. Since 2018, she has been printing the Documents on Expanded Poetics series.

Bebenek is a graduate of Concordia University’s MA in Creative Writing & English, where she studied poetry & expanded poetics, the culture & technologies of feminist subjectivities, and the revaluation of gendered labour. Bebenek works as an educator & workshop-facilitator through Dawson College, the Quebec Writers Federation, and Vallum Society for Arts and Letter, while writing and working as a freelance designer and bookmaker.

You can follow Jessica at @notyrmuse on Instagram, where she is most active online. You’ll find photography of new projects, works-in-progress, and writing which has been studied in CEGEP and graduate classrooms across Canada.