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 is the author of the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019). 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) (The Salvage Press, 2024) with Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin and an Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award for sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication in conversation with Calvino’s Invisible Cities created in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media.
Kimberly’s latest poetry collection An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury) was described by Oluwaseun Olayiwola in the Guardian ‘as startlingly inventive […] a work to care about’ and Maria Crawford in the Financial Times as a collection of ‘grounded and transporting’ poems that ‘will reward your time and re-reading’.
Her debut novel Use the Words You Have (Somesuch Editions) was called ‘a masterpiece’ (Irish Independent), ‘effervescent’ (Irish Times), and ‘a moving study of both literary form and desire’ (Times Literary Supplement). It was shortlisted for this year’s Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.
Extracts from her work-in-progress, a new version of Dante’s Commedia, have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Poetry Ireland Review, Still Point, Pamenar Magazine, The Long Poem Magazine, Notre Dame Review and The Routledge Companion to Dante. She has discussed this work on BBC The Verb with Ian McMillan and in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama in a two-part feature for Poetry Unbound on The On Being podcast.
Kimberly is Professor of Poetry and Director of Poetry@Leeds at the University of Leeds, where she works alongside Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, and in collaboration with the new National Poetry Centre.
Kimberly is represented by Becky Thomas at Lewinsohn Literary.
author photo Olivia Brabbs