Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is an American poet, editor, essayist, and professor.Life and career
Gabrielle Calvocoressi was born in 1974 in central Connecticut. Her family owned movie theaters, including a drive-in, in several small towns across the state. Calvocoressi has used her writing to reflect on her mother's mental illness and suicide; her work also explores small town America, history, sexuality, faith, violence, gender, and the body.
She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned an MFA from Columbia University.
She has been a visiting professor of poetry at UCLA, Bennington College, and UC-Irvine, and held a Stegner Fellowship and a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University. She has also taught in the MFA program at California College of the Arts.
Calvocoressi is Poetry Editor at Large for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Stemming from her "deep interest in interdisciplinary approaches to writing, art, and ecological culture," she created Voluble, an "off-the-page makers’ space for writers and artists of all kinds," supported by LARB.
She has written about her experiences with nystagmus and how the visual/neurological difference has shaped her work as a poet and a reader.
She now teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, and at University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill, where she is an Associate Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry. She lives in North Carolina with her partner Angeline Shaka. Currently, she serves as the director for The Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH.Awards and honors
