In oceanleaving, Daze Jefferies? counter-history of rural trans and sex worker resistance evokes the ebb and flow of intergenerational love at the margins. Guided by archival relationships, dreaming, and regard, her lyric, visual, and prose poems are fierce in their address of colonial and sexual violence, gendered labour, and cultural loss in Atlantic Canada. With/holding and recasting the intimate presence of a watermother, a grandmother, a brothel mother, and a trans mother, oceanleaving offers a sensuous kinship between tenacious women and the sea.
About the Author :
Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator based in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Her multidisciplinary research-creation practice explores queer, trans, and sex worker embodiments, counter-histories, and intergenerational relationships in Atlantic Canada.
She is the author of the poetry chapbooks water/wept (Anstruther, 2023) and ebbs caressive (Antiphony, 2026) as well as co-author of Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge: Unsettled Islands (Palgrave, 2018). Her work has also been published in The Ex-Puritan, PRISM international, filling Station, Arc, and the League of Canadian Poets? Visual Poetry Chapbook, as well as anthologized in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers? Poetry (Arsenal Pulp, 2019) and Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Goose Lane, 2019). Her work has been exhibited and performed at The Rooms, Eastern Edge Artist-Run-Centre, Grenfell Art Gallery, Owens Art Gallery, Galerie de l?UQAM, and the Art Gallery of Guelph, among others.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Emerging Artist Award and 2025 Milestone Award from VANL-CARFAC, the 2024 Riddle Fence Poetry Prize, and a 2025 Arts & Letters Award for poetry from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
