Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is an American poet, editor, essayist, and professor. Their poetry collection The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.^[1]

Gabrielle Calvocoressi was born in 1974^[2] in central Connecticut.^[3] Their family owned movie theaters, including a drive-in, in several small towns across the state.^[4][5] Calvocoressi, who is a nonbinary lesbian,^[6][7] has used their writing to reflect on their mother's mental illness and suicide;^[8][9] their work also explores small town America, history, sexuality, faith, violence, gender, and the body.^[10][8]

They studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned an MFA from Columbia University.^[3]

They have 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.^[11] They 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 (LARB).^[12] Stemming from their "deep interest in interdisciplinary approaches to writing, art, and ecological culture," they created Voluble, an "off-the-page makers’ space for writers and artists of all kinds," supported by LARB.^[13][14]

They have written about their experiences with nystagmus and how the visual/neurological difference has shaped their work as a poet and a reader.^[15][16][9]

They now teach in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers,^[17] and at University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill, where they are an Associate Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry.^[18] They live in North Carolina with their partner Angeline Shaka.^[19] Currently, they serve as the director for The Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH.

• 2000 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.^[20]
• 2002 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.^[21]
• 2002 Jones Lectureship at Stanford University.^[11]
• 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry, winner for The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.^[22]
• 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, finalist for Apocalyptic Swing.^[23]
• 2012 Lannan Foundation Writers' Residency in Marfa.^[24]
• 2018 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry (Publishing Triangle), for Rocket Fantastic.^[25]
• 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, finalist for The New Economy.^[1]

• The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. Persea Books. 2005. ISBN 9780892553150. OCLC 56591239
• Apocalyptic Swing. Persea Books. 2009. ISBN 9780892553532. OCLC 892496860
• The New Economy Chapbook Vol. 1: Inexpensive, Healthy, Hopeful Feasts for 2017.^[26][27]
• Rocket Fantastic. Persea Books. September 2017. ISBN 9780892554850. OCLC 1008903574
• The New Economy. Copper Canyon Press. 2025. ISBN 9781556597213.^[28]

• Chapbook: Southern Foodways Alliance > The New Economy Chapbook Vol. 1: Inexpensive, Healthy, Hopeful Feasts for 2017 Archived 2017-06-04 at the Wayback Machine
• Poem: The American Poetry Review > Vol. 44, No. 6 > Praise House: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
• Poem: Boston Review > 2013 > from Rocket Fantastic by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
• Interview: Divedapper > No. 19, March 2015 > An Interview with Gabrielle Calvocoressi by Kaveh Akbar