Gabrielle Calvocoressi (’02) and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (’97) Receive Literary Honors

 (l-r) Gabrielle Calvocoressi (photo: Alyssa LaFaro) and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (photo: Sydney A. Foster)

Gabrielle Calvocoressi (RJFWA ’02) has been named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. "Established in 1946, the Board of Chancellors is a group of fifteen distinguished poets who advise on artistic matters, judge its largest legacy prizes, and serve as ambassadors of poetry.” Gabrielle will serve a six-year term. Their recent collection of poetry, The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press 2025), was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella de Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022-2023 and teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s (RJFWA ’97) nonfiction debut, Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings (Harper 2025), was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and scholar. She has published five books of poetry, including The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Prize in Poetry, was a finalist for the George Washington Prize in History, and was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Jeffers’s first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, featured on President Barack Obama’s reading list, and listed as a “Ten Best Books of the Year” by The New York Times. Love Songs won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. Love Songs was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction. Jeffers is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others.

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