Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Current Season Poet
For over twenty years, Gabrielle Calvocoressi has crafted deeply compelling poems about queer loneliness, bodily awareness, mental health, and familial tension. In their latest publication, The New Economy (Copper Canyon, 2025), Calvocoressi explores grief in its various forms, alternating between the perspectives of their childhood and present selves—sometimes even within the same poem. Their intimate and inventive collection of “cistern” poems reconsiders the body, mourn the passing of childhood traits, the loss of loved ones, young heartbreak, and feelings of disconnection from community. The New Economy invites us to join together—in Calvocoressi’s words, “Come on, Everybody”—to find solace in unprecedented places, and reminding all readers that it is a poet’s work to slowly and carefully interpret the world around them with dedication and care. Calvocoressi’s poetry, as described by literary critic Jonathan Farmer, attempts “to create a place where people can hold something for each other, where there is room to breathe.”
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is also the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award, and they served as the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022–2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
Calvocoressi’s reading will be followed by conversation with Leila Chatti in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, September 30 at 7 p.m. Free & open to the public. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.