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Stephen Campiglio
Stephen Campiglio

A full descendant from the Italian region of Abruzzo, Stephen Campiglio was born in Stoneham, MA in 1959 and grew up in the Merrimack River Valley of northeastern MA. He earned a B.A. in English from Worcester State College and M.A. in Education from Assumption College. A longtime resident of Worcester, MA, he now makes his home in southern Worcester County. He has also lived in Boston, San Francisco, Missoula, MT (with one year in the University's M.F.A. program), and Portland, OR.

During the late 1980s, he was the publicist and a performing member of the Worcester-based artists' cooperative, Noh Place, as well as a member of Forbidden Poets, a spoken word/music collective whose weekly Sunday night improvisations could often be heard live on WCUW (91.3 FM) in Worcester. In the 1990s, he worked as a bookseller and manager at Borders Book Shop in Framingham, MA, where he founded and coordinated the store's poetry reading series. He later became editorial assistant for the Office of Public Affairs at Assumption College, and while finishing his master's degree there, co-founded the d'Alzon Arts Poetry series in 2001. He went on to teach a year of high school English before serving as education manager for a nonprofit organization.

Since 2005, he has worked as program associate and catalog editor for Credit-Free Programs at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT, where he founded and coordinates the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series. His poems have appeared in Anthology of New England Writers, Asylum, Caduceus, Calapooya, Coe Review, Ekphrasis, Italian Americana, The Lumberyard Journal, Natural Bridge, Osiris, Paragraph, Sahara, Switched-on Gutenberg, Urban Spaghetti, and The Worcester Review, among others, and the anthology, New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian American Poetry, with work forthcoming in Arts End Books, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, Ping*Pong, and Skidrow Penthouse. His first chapbook, Cross-Fluence, will be published by Soft Spur Press in Missoula, MT in early 2012. Campiglio's poetry awards include: three times a finalist in Worcester County Poetry Association's annual poetry contest (fourth place in 1989, judged by Russell Edson; second place in 1993, judged by Olga Broumas; and honorable mention in 2010, judged by Barbara Helfgott Hyett); a semi-finalist in Two Rivers Review 2002 annual poetry contest; three times a finalist in New England Writers Robert Penn Warren Free Verse Annual Award (honorable mention in 2002; judged by Yusef Komunyakaa; a commendable in 2003, judged by Cynthia Huntington; and honorable mention in 2004, judged by Peter Filkins); featured poet in the Summer '08 issue of Italian Americana (selected by Michael Palma) and a finalist in the 2008 and 2009 Bordighera Poetry Book Prize. He performs his poetry as part of a spoken word/music ensemble, Cross-Fluence (formerly The Bluebottles).

 

Artist Statement (by way of a poem):

Verbal Event Centered on the Window

I'm stuck on what it's called and corroborate the word with a phone call to
Sash & Door down the street: mullion, yes, that's it. I thank the man and
insert the word into the poem at hand.

Then I take the noun further than sales. Its Indo-European root,
medhyo, meaning "the middle," leads us to Old Norse, Midgard, a
mythological name for earth as the intermediate zone that divides heaven from
hell.

The mullion divides the window into panes of glass. The glass
separates in from out, while providing a connection between the two—

the best word is the one
that gets you
through.

 

Cross-Fluence
Poems by Stephen Campiglio
Published by Soft Spur Press, Missoula, Montana: 2012
Cover art: AJ Juarez; Back cover: Michel Duncan Merle

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