Kasia van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century North American literature, creative writing, autobiography, experimental writing, eco-feminist poetics, and contemporary cultural theory and visual culture. She is particularly interested in the narrative intersections between gender, domesticity, and the environment.

Kasia’s first book, the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth (The University of Alberta Press), was nominated for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Concordia University First Book Prize, the ReLit Prize for short fiction, and was named a best book of 2023 by the Miramichi Reader. Her next book, a work of cultural criticism and memoir entitled Women Among Monuments (forthcoming with Dundurn Press in 2025), explores 20th century histories of female genius, asking what, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for artmaking. She is also currently co-editing with Dr. Myra Bloom (York University) an academic essay collection, Shelter in Text, which investigates the relationship between shelter and narrative.

Kasia’s writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, This Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Best Canadian Poetry, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Jacket2, Canadian Studies in English, the Routledge Anthology of AI and Literature (forthcoming) and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, received the Mona Adilman Prize for poetry related to ecological concerns.

Kasia holds a PhD from McGill University, where her doctoral thesis, Small Dislocations: Narrative Acts Beyond the Home, won the 2023 Arts Insights Dissertation Award for the Social Sciences and Humanities. This project argues that the mid-century’s enduring domestic symbol of the good life—the quest for wealth, social success and wellbeing represented by the free-standing suburban house—has been one of the most significant factors in determining North America’s current unviable model of living. Exploring how narrative depictions of unsettled and unsettling domesticity challenge, and also participate in, the good life ideal, this project asks: what new stories—in both the narrative and architectural sense—become available to us if we recalibrate our relationship to the home?

Before joining UNB’s English Department, Kasia held a two-year FRQSC postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology and taught literature, film, and creative writing at McGill University.

Kasia welcomes inquiries from graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in contemporary literature and creative writing, with focuses on fiction and lyric nonfiction, and experimental prose.