“[Campanello] is attempting something new, something challenging and inspiring and radical, something that hasn’t been seen before in contemporary Irish poetry. In my opinion, not only does she succeed in this attempt, her work wildly exceeds expectation.”
Photo © Ror Conaty of Monolith
Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and is a dual Irish and American citizen living in York. Her poetry publications include Consent, Imagines and Strange Country (both on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings), Hymn to Kālī (her version of the Karpūrādi-stotra), and running commentary along the bottom of the tapestry. MOTHERBABYHOME, a collection of 796 conceptual and visual poems on the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, was published by zimZalla Avant Objects in April 2019.
Kimberly's poems and autofiction have appeared most recently in The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The White Review, and The Cambridge Literary Review and The Poetry Review. A long sequence on her experience of Young Onset Parkinson’s appears in Granta.
In March 2020, she represented the UK in Munich at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a three-day visual poetry festival inspired by the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s. Her visual poetry features in the international anthology Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry published by Timglaset. Her asemic writing and autofiction was most recently exhibited in at HAUS Vienna in September 2020 and is published in Praxis (Dostoyevsky Wannabe).
Kimberly won a 2019 Markievicz Award from Ireland's Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for (S)worn State(s), a poetry collaboration with Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin (forthcoming from The Salvage Press) and an Arts Council Ireland 2020 Literature Project Award for a digital writing collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. She collaborated on One Island, an NEA-funded project to create a new performance-installation with Jim Brock, Brittney Brady and Ghostbird Theatre Company. She has been awarded residencies at the Fundación Valparaíso, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, The Studios of Key West and the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris.
She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Kimberly is represented by Becky Thomas at Lewinsohn Literary.
“Campanello turns bureaucracy against itself. [...] Through these hybrid sentences, Campanello highlights the unsuitability of the language of the tabloids, the law and public inquiries to describe such raw and personal experiences.”
Presenting Paula Claire's Third verse of a Sonnet in Motion (2003) at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century. Photo © Elisabeth Greil for the British Council