Alumna Isabella DeSendi '17 Publishes 'Through the New Body' Chapbook

Through the New Body, the chapbook with which Alumna Isabella DeSendi '17 won the 2019 Poetry Society of America 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship has been published by the Poetry Society of America and is available for pre-order now. 

The 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship awarded DeSendi a monetary prize of $1000 and publication of her winning chapbook. Poet Evie Shockley, who selected DeSendi for the prize in 2019, says of Through the New Body: "DeSendi's poetry is generous. It tells you where you are, even when that where is a space of limbo...We are in limbo, because we are in the world in the body of a girl-becoming-woman, an American with Cuban matrilineage, a sufferer who causes suffering. Autobiographical or not, these poems give us a figure who seeks to understand her own distress in relation to that experienced by women of different ages and backgrounds." 

According to DeSendi, "this chapbook is about sexual assault, racism, love, heartbreak, God, New York, death, and everything in between." In a statement about winning the Chapbook Fellowship, DeSendi discussed her reaction to "having a gaggle of [poems] set permanently in print," saying: "What's helped with the anxiety of publishing (because let's be honest, what writer doesn't feel anxious when work enters the world?) is knowing that voices like mine need to speak up and occupy space in this world."  

Isabella DeSendi is a Cuban-Italian poet and educator. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange, Two Peach, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Grief Diaries. She was recently a finalist for the 2019 Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook contest judged by Jericho Brown and a finalist for the June Jordan Fellowship and Narrative Magazine's Annual Poetry Prize. Isabella is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship. She lives in New York City, where she works in finance.