Across her writing and performance in whatever form it takes, Kimberly Campanello’s abiding preoccupation is with the power of language to ‘change states’ in all senses of the phrase – changing our understandings of the law and the State, changing our emotional-physical-spiritual-intellectual states, and changing its own state as each word shifts and morphs with every use and encounter.
Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and is a dual Irish and American citizen living in York. Her most recent projects include MOTHERBABYHOME, a collection of 796 conceptual and visual poems on the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway (Manchester: zimZalla Avant Objects, 2019) and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication produced in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media.
New poems have appeared recently in Poetry Ireland Review, The Cambridge Literary Review and The Poetry Review.‘Moving Nowhere Here’ was the most-read poem in Granta in 2023. Her prose has appeared in The London Magazine, Tolka, Somesuch Stories and The Pig’s Back.
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.
She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner 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 Literature Project Award. She recently received an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Award to foster her writing on chronic illness/disability.
She is Professor of Poetry and a member of the Poetry Centre and the Centre for Dante Studies at the University of Leeds. Kimberly is represented by Becky Thomas at Lewinsohn Literary.
author photo Olivia Brabbs