Jessica Bebenek is an interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator living between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabe territory. She works as a risograph printer & bookmaker at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. k2tog, her collection of knitting patterns for poems,was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press and her twelve-hour knitting performance The Waste Land was featured at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche.
Bebenek’s writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include You Don’t Get Out Much (2024), I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM (Gap Riot Press, 2022), and What is Punk (2019). Her first full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There (Book*hug 2025), was shortlisted for two Quebec Writers’ Federation’s awards and named a Best Book of 2025 by the CBC. She spends a lot of time thinking about chronic pain, refusal, empathy, slow time, anti-capitalism, gendered labour, garbage, and textiles. @notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art