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Process Series: Three Poets
April 13 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Three Poets in Performance with Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Elisabeth Lewis Corley, and Destiny Hemphill, with music by Nikki Kilgore and company
Three poets explore race, ethnicity, gender, culture, intersectionality, and what we might require to address our global climate and cascading emergencies in an evening of performed poetry accented by musician Nikki Kilgore.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi 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 awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, the New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. 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. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022-2023.
Elisabeth Lewis Corley was founding artistic director of the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, now operating as The Shakespeare Tavern. NYC: actor and producer for Signature Theatre Company in its first four seasons and in plays by Jim Grimsley for Harland’s Creek Productions. Producer for StreetSigns in NC and NYC since 2012. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway appearances: Signature Theatre Company, 47th Street Theatre, Harland’s Creek Productions, Triangle Theatre.
Regional appearances: StreetSigns, Manbites Dog, Bulldog Ensemble Theater, Triad Stage, Justice Theater Project. Film and TV: Candy for Hulu, One Tree Hill, One Life to Live, Ten Hundred Kings. MFA in poetry Warren Wilson Program for Writers and B.A. with Highest- Honors-in-Poetry from UNC Chapel Hill where she has taught screenwriting and poetry performance. Corley’s poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Hyperion, Carolina Quarterly, Feminist Studies, BigCityLit, MahMag, The New Haven Review, Cold Mountain, Consequence Magazine: An International Literary Magazine Focusing on the Culture of War, Michigan Quarterly Review, and MiddleLost. She was a 2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellow in Poetry and is a member Dramatists Guild, Actors’ Equity Association, and SAG/AFTRA.
Destiny Hemphill is the 2022-23 Kenan Visiting Writer in the Creative Writing Program at UNC Chapel Hill. Hemphill, who received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of South Carolina, is the author of motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books, 2023). The recipient of fellowships from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Callaloo, Tin House, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Hemphill is the author of the poetry chapbook Oracle: A Cosmology (Honeysuckle Press, 2018). Hemphill’s current interests include Afro-pessimism, Black mysticism, critical geography, and Black radical traditions. Her work has been featured in Narrative Northeast, The Wanderer, Winter Tangerine, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Hemphill is a ritual worker and poet based in Durham, North Carolina.
Nikki Kilgore is a singer-songwriter whose musical influences run the gamut of genres from gospel, classical, folk, funk, rock, reggae, and jazz. She grew up singing and playing bass in the church while exploring musical theatre and open mic nights in her formative years eventually earning a degree in Music Media from Norfolk State University. Her most recent musical endeavor is as the bassist and one of the frontwomen for the band Seed Is. The band has toured up and down the East Coast, released two albums, and has been the opening act for many artists such as James Brown and The Roots.