8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: WEEK 3:: INTRODUCTION BY CURATORS KRISTINA DARLING & CHRIS CAMPANIONI, AUTHORS OF THE FORTHCOMING RE:VERSES
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by five incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curators are Kristina Darling & Chris Campanioni, authors of the forthcoming chapbook, RE: Verses.
For a series built on recognizing the words of others, and the acknowledgement of the unreturnable debt we owe to one another, it felt natural to invite people who have each, in their own way, continued to influence and shape my own work as an editor and a writer. Lauren Hilger, whose role-playing adaptations of Golden Era cinema in Lady Be Good re-work both glamor and nostalgia, has repeatedly gifted me with her presence — physically and virtually — and also gifted my new book with joyous insight into our current poeti-cultural climate. Our shared moments of revelry and revelation continue to sustain and inform me. Likewise, I am privileged to share a publisher in C&R Press with Ariel Francisco, whose poetics continue to revitalize the New York School, for which a subway ride becomes an occasion for a poem (and the best kind), and whose work on translation endeavors toward more than just homage to a familial, and familiar, original. Finally, I would not be the writer I am today — right now, at 7:01PM on a Saturday night in early April — if I did not work alongside Jessica Fischoff to run PANK Magazine and PANK Books, where we have the tremendous opportunity to publish voices and stories that would otherwise not have a home. It is my hope that in seeing ourselves and our work as part of a larger conversation — one that encapsulates and demands acceptance and accountability to so many others — we can also recognize our own subject positions within a system of global inequality and structural and structuring marginalization, particularly in the world republic of letters. May we always see ourselves in conversation with one another, a situation in which everything we do is collaborative and crowd-sourced, in the sense that we are drawing from and are drawn by people we may otherwise have never encountered, not with such vulnerability or intimacy; not with the imminence and eminence that language and literature affords us.
— Chris Campanioni, April 6, 2019
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press). He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches Latinx literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University. His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable — and often muted — identity in the fashion world was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. A year earlier, he adapted his award-winning course, “Identity, Image, & Intimacy in the Age of the Internet,” for his first TEDx Talk. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and lives in Brooklyn.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Re: VERSES (with Chris Campanioni; The Operating System, 2019); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.
