Mees Kempenaers works as an assistant and doctoral researcher at the English Literature section of Ghent University. Their dissertation focuses on North-American trans poetries of the 2010s and explores trans poetry as a form of and site for what Hil Malatino calls "trans arts of survival," a phrase that brings together notions of survival, care, and flourishing, and questions regarding trans people's relation to the past, present, and future.