The first Leonard Cohen Poet-In-Residence at Westmount High School(Cohen's alma mater) will be Möe Clark, a spoken word artist and international performer.

"The Foundation For Public Poetry is proud to have Möe as our inaugural Poet-In-Residence, a residency established to honour Leonard Cohen on his 75th birthday," says Jack Locke, president of the foundation. "She will give the students of Westmount High the kind of positive encouragement that poet Irving Layton gave to Leonard and countless others."

"I would hope that with my performance experience and passion for collaborative exchange, I would be able to bring an exciting and inspirational energy to Westmount High School," says Clark.

A brief introduction/press event will be held at:

10 A.M., February 2, 2010
Westmount High School
4350 Ste. Catherine St. West, Westmount/Montreal

Clark has over ten years of experience performing, writing and collaborating with various artists in the fields of poetry, visual arts, and music. She has a Bachelors Degree in Design from the Alberta College of Art & Design and has performed in internationally recognized festivals in Canada, Europe and South America.

The Leonard Cohen Poet-In-Residence program is a collaborative effort by the Foundation for Public Poetry, Westmount High School, and the Westmount High Alumni Association.

Möe Clark   
www.myspace.com/moeclarkspokenword

Métis sound artist Möe Clark fuses her unique understanding of performance narrative with traditions of circle singing and spoken word. With a background in voice, spoken word, and visual arts, she creates a lyrical style, steeped in ritual and poetic exploration.  Her poetic songs resonate with the power to heal, to celebrate spirit and to connect with authentic purpose.

After her debut album release “Circle of She: Story & Song” (April ’08) Möe toured extensively across Canada and recently made her debut performances in Europe and South America. As a featured artist in the 2009 Maelström ReEvolution Poétique FiEstival in Brussels, Belgium, she performed alongside Wemotachi elder and storyteller Matotoson Iriniu (Charles Coocoo, Quebec).

Her work will be published in a bilingual poetry book in Spring 2010 through Maëlstrom publications, with translations by Marseilles poet Pierre Guéry. Preliminary translations of the texts were performed bilingually with Guéry at the Maelström Festival.

Feature highlights include performances for the 2009 Métis Week in Medicine Hat, '07-'08 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, the 2009 festival voix d’Amériques, the 2009 Diverse as This Land Performance at the Banff Centre, and the 2007 CBC Calgary Poetry Face-Off.

Möe has collaborated with and performed alongside established artists such as Ian Ferrier (Montreal), D.Kimm (Montreal), Sheri-D Wilson (Calgary), and Tanya Tagaq (Nunavut). Aside from her poetry performance work, Möe facilitates voice and looping pedal workshops to youth and adults and she collaborates in areas of artistic production, composition and performance creation.

In November 2009 she co-directed and designed Tusarniq, the sold-out second annual Indigenous Words, Music & Images festival in Montreal, QC. In 2008 she collaborated with contemporary dancers Jenn Doan and Carmen Ruiz to create Transfiguration, an interdisciplinary performance show featuring dance and voice that ran to sold-out audiences in Calgary, AB.

In Spring 2009 Möe collaborated with the National Film Board of Canada and film artist Emmanuel Hessler on a short poetry video entitled Circle Haiku, a production that involved translation work, compositional development and audio engineering. Most recently she directed and premiered her video poem Intersecting Circles, a poem that won the 2007 CBC Calgary Poetry Face-Off and received support from the AFA, CCA, and Bravo!Fact.

Continued collaborations include performing with Ian Ferrier and experimental music group Pharmakon, developing the Bird Messengers Collective project with Algonquin theatre artist Emilie Monnet and creating designs for festivals and other artists. Möe believes in the power of transformation and the continuum of the oral tradition through active involvement in communities, both locally and internationally.