Luminous Gender Vessel Introduction

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005); Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas, the Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry from The Paris Review, and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation.  Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals, including The Baffler, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection TOMBOYLAND (Little A/TOPPLE Books, 2020), named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, The New York Public Library, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature, and the recipient of a 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, Bitch, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022); it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a Notable Selection in Best American Essays 2016. Faliveno is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her debut novel, Hemlock, is forthcoming in 2026 from Little, Brown. Find more at www.melissafaliveno.com.