Research Guides (LibGuides): Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

More Information

PODCASTS

All Up in Your Ears Podcast
"A monthly podcast featuring francine j. harris, Kaveh Akbar, Jonathan Farmer, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi discussing, extolling, deviating from and disagreeing about recent poems...At the end, we all talk about things that have caught our interest recently, and then one of us calls another poet for a short interview."
From “Circus Fire, 1944″ By Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Calvocoressi reads from her poem cycle "Circus Fire, 1944," based on the historic Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus Fire in Hartford, Connecticut.
"Pastoral" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Calvocoressi reads her poems "Pastoral," "Save Me Joe Lewis," "The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart," and more.

INTERVIEWS

Interrogate the Slow Jam: A Conversation with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
In this week’s PEN's Poetry Relay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, a poet and essayist whose books include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, discusses her communication with silence, the union of John Coltrane and Martin Luther King, and the poetic legacy of Al B. Sure!
“How many people are convinced they’re not supposed to be happy?”: Interview with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Kaveh Akbar of Dive Dapper interviewed Calvocoressi while giving her a ride from North Carolina to Virginia so that she could do a reading.
Alex Dimitrov of Lambda Literary interviews Gabrielle Calvocoressi
From Alex Dimitrov: "I was happy to finally have a conversation with [Calvocoressi] and find out that she’s just as generous and smart as her poems. One thing I admire about her, and which you’ll see in this interview, is that she doesn’t shy away from talking and thinking about the big issues: our secrets, obsessions, histories, identities, the polarizing world we live in, the gods we worship, etc."
The Rumpus Original Combo with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
The Rumpus conducted this interview via email over a period of two months in late 2009.

Many works by our Visiting Writers' Series authors are pulled from their normal places on the shelves and temporarily located in a special display in the Browsing Collection. This collection is located near the Information Commons service desk, next to the vending machines and newspapers.

When you look at an item's record in WorldCat Discovery, be sure to note whether the items is in the General Stacks (mostly 2nd floor) or the Browsing Collection (1st floor). If you have any questions about locating an item on the shelf, don't hesitate to ask us!

Remember - if we don't own it or our copy is currently checked out, you probably can still get a copy through PALShare or interlibrary loan! Learn more.

The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart - Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
"Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populacein the edgy jazz portrait, "Suite Billy Strayhorn," for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, "At the Adult Drive-In," which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind." - Google Books
Apocalyptic Swing by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
"Rarely has a first book of poems been more exalted than Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, which the Times Literary Supplement called “an excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator.” Now, in this extraordinary follow-up, Calvocoressi continues her mission to document the particular hardships of derelict American small towns.

These, though, are different poems, their lens cracked and turned on a narrator seeking her own deliverance from abandonment and violence. Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America—its lore, disappointments, and promise." -Google Books

"Born in central Connecticut, Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in a family that owned movie theaters in several small towns across the state. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned her MFA from Columbia University.

Calvocoressi’s first book, The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A Booklist review for The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart notes: “There is something distinctly American not only in the rural towns she depicts and the voices she ‘channels’ but also in a brutally honest yet compassionately tender revelation of hidden truths. Calvocoressi has moved beyond the popular poetry of ‘self’ in an effort to understand other perspectives in this original and riveting collection.”

Calvocoressi’s awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women Writers’ Award. Her poem “Circus Fire, 1944” received The Paris Review‘s Bernard F. Connors Prize. She teaches at the MFA programs at California College of Arts in San Francisco and at Warren Wilson College. She also runs the sports desk for the Best American Poetry Blog."

Source: "Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi." Poets.org. 2016.

Literary Sources This link opens in a new window
Literary Sources provides information in primary sources, critical articles, literary and cultural analysis, and biographies.

Library Journal Book Review
Click on the Library Journal link (use the one that has more full texts available) to access it through the Butler library. Use the author's name as your search term in the "search within the publication" box to find reviews of her work.
New York Times Book Review
This link will take you to the New York Times Book Review hosted on the Literature Resource Center database. It includes issues from 2001 to present. You can search within the entire publication (box at top of page) or you can select a specific year from the drop-down menu. Older issues are available via other databases - ask a librarian for help accessing these issues.

Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

More Information

Campus Visit

Twitter Feed

CONTACT

QUICK LINKS