Born in central Connecticut, Gabrielle Calvocoressi received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Columbia University. They teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), and Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017), which won the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
in grad school I was turned on to Gabrielle Calvocoressi and they really changed things for me -- conceptually how a story could be told through poetry as in The Last Time I Saw Emilia Earhart, and how explorations of boxing and jazz both as metaphors and literal essence can inhabit a book of poetry as in Apocalyptic Swing.