The fifth and final part of the Fifth Annual Alumni Poetry Reading Series featured Stephanie Adams-Santos '09, Gabrielle Calvocoressi '00, Christopher Kondrich '08, and Zeeshan Pathan '18.
Organized by Timothy Donnelly, Writing.
Stephanie Adams-Santos '09 is a Guatemalan-American writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and other swampy, hybrid forms. Her work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, and environment—with a penchant for the queer and uncanny. Stephanie’s full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown (Fathom Books), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She is also the author of Total Memory (Finishing Line Press), and The Sundering (Poetry Society of America), winner of a New York Chapbook Fellowship. Stephanie is a writer for Two Sentence Horror Stories (Netflix/CW), an anthology series featuring short tales of horror and haunting.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi '00 is 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 honors including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review, among others. An editor at large at Los Angeles Review of Books and poetry editor at Southern Cultures, 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.
Christopher Kondrich '08 is the author of two books of poetry, the most recent of which, Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), was selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series. It was named by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019 and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Recent poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Northwest. The recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The I-Park Foundation, he is an associate editor for 32 Poems and lives and teaches in Maryland.
Zeeshan Pathan '18 is the author of The Minister of Disturbances (Diode Editions, 2020). He attended Washington University in Saint Louis as a Kenneth E. Hudson Scholar where he studied poetry with Mary Jo Bang, Carl Phillips, and Fatemeh Keshavarz. He speaks several languages and translates from Urdu, Turkish, and Persian. At Columbia University he completed his MFA under Lucie Brock-Broido. His poetry has been featured in Tarpaulin Sky Press Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and in an anthology of contemporary American Muslim writings by Red Hen Press.
