Award-winning poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 7 in the Menard Law Building and will provide a week-long writer’s workshop as part of the University of Idaho Department of English’s Distinguished Visiting Writer series.Calvocorressi teaches in 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. She was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Time Book and a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women Writers’ Award.
Her first book, “The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart,” was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry, and her poem “Circus Fire, 1944” received “The Paris Review’s” Bernard F. Connors Prize.
Doug Heckman, UI MFA Creative Writing Program director, said although Calvocorressi is a young poet, the major awards and fellowships she has won show her abilities and promise.
Heckman said Calvocoressi is smart, funny and engaging, and that her poetry brings alive commonplace things.
“Gabrielle’s poetry examines subjects that are familiar to many of us: sports, Twitter, prom queen, high school football games, small town gossip, movies. She examines these very American concerns, then provides the reader insights that she or he may not have considered,” Heckman said. “The magic is in how she makes these common subjects beautiful and uniquely powerful.”
Calvocoressi will commence this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writer series, which was instituted at the university in 1978 and is sponsored in whole by the UI Department of English. The series aims to bring in nationally recognized writers and solid teachers, and Calvocoressi meets both these requirements, Heckman said.
In addition to her reading, Calvocoressi will provide graduate and undergraduate writers with a week of instruction in poetry, fiction and nonfiction writing, both in workshop settings and in one-on-one sessions Nov. 5 through Nov. 9. Participants in the workshop can receive one UI credit.
“It’s a huge honor for our students to work with a writer of Gabrielle’s stature,” Heckman said. “The community greatly enjoys hearing these writers.”
Gary Williams, UI Department of English chair, said the series used to bring in one writer for a full semester, with an emphasis on undergraduate students. The series has since expanded its focus by bringing in a mix of three to four poetry, fiction and nonfiction authors a year, with an aim to include members of the Moscow community as well.
“The series has brought some amazing people here. It’s brought Nobel Prize winners; it’s brought Poet Laureates,” Williams said. “It’s dramatically enriched in what we can offer students, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, not just in terms of writing instruction, but contacts and an awareness of how things operate at other institutions.”
Nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit and fiction writer Adam Johnson will also take part in this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writers series, which will continue next semester.
Courtney Miller can be reached at [email protected]