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Cox Family Process Speaker Series, featuring Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic

4th Annual Cox Family Process Speaker Series

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at ˛ĘĂń±¦µä hosts our 4th annual Cox Family Process Speaker Series on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, and features award-winning poet, artist, and Associate Professor of creative writing Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The Cox Family Process Speaker Series annual programming seeks to bring renowned artists and scholars to ˛ĘĂń±¦µä each spring to speak about work that made them well-known in their fields of study and research.

 is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and  (winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry). This event focuses on Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic, which has been described as a "spellbinding reinvention and exploration of self, gender, and family." In Rocket Fantastic, Calvocoressi innovatively uses the musical segno symbol in replacement of traditional pronouns for one of the main characters, allowing readers to engage with the poem’s content while leaving sex and gender as an open question. 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. 

The first 30 people to register (and attend the event) will receive a free copy of the book . We will have refreshments and dessert available for all attendees.

Please note that this event is free and open to the public, but registration is recommended. Register here if you wish to attend the event: 

Quote from :

"The thing that’s interesting to me about the Bandleader poems and that [dal segno] symbol has to do with power and how we relate to power in ourselves and others. I think for me in my own body that’s had a lot to do with what I think of as my male body, which is how I identified until I was about seven (and still do in many ways), and how I relate to my feminine body. There’s a quote at the end of the book, “Depending on the day, the Bandleader is this or that”—and I don’t mean that in a trite way; I really mean that. So the Bandleader and the symbol and the intake of breath are me trying to allow the illegibility of my understanding and my need for understanding of my body and my physical space in the world to become apparent—to myself first and then to others. I don’t know if that makes sense."

- Gabrielle Calvocoressi on Rocket Fantastic — October 15, 2017

Review of Rocket Fantastic,

One of the most important qualities of being a writer is a kind of bravery. Rocket Fantastic has this above all else, and in a way that overflows, giving power to the limited and the denied; not only in terms of gender, but those of ideas. The poems resist those invisible structures upon which the political economy insists. To that end, the poems often have violence at their edges, as if an atavistic presence is there working in the background. Poems often play with tone to convey their meanings; others evoke a mood and nothing more; yet when have you read a poem that uses feelings almost as textures, coloring the background, and through which the speaker(s) peer through, are held down by, or escape from? Using emotion in a dimensional way is something this book advances and it’s something from which we could all learn a great deal.

- Sean Singer, Reviewer - November 14, 2017

Event Information

  • ​¶Ů˛ąłŮ±đ:ĚýWednesday, April 17, 2024
  • Time: 5:30pm - 7pm
  • Location: in-person at ˛ĘĂń±¦µä's Norlin Library - Center for British & Irish Studies (CBIS) room, M549
  • ¸é±đ˛µľ±˛őłŮ°ů˛ąłŮľ±´Ç˛Ô:Ěý
  • Event is free and open to the public.