Chessy Normile
Writing and Reading and Teaching Poetry
Girl Blood Info Zine Series Editor
<3
Photo by Courtney Allen
Heeelelllllooooo
yes 'tis my WEBSITE
Chessy Normile is the author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2020 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize. She edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info and is currently the 2022-2023 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
September 2020
Order the book from American Poetry Review
Order the book from Copper Canyon Press
Winner of the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Chessy Normile’s debut collection, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, asks what would happen if we actually believed language to be a creative force that constructs our lived experience. Though “hope” is something we assign to the future, these poems disrupt time in order to be hopeful about the past. They could be funny all the time, but often choose not to be in the critical moment, using humor to become more vulnerable rather than less. Chessy Normile’s poetry is, according to Li-Young Lee, “smart, curious, original, and authentically weird.”
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves" hahaha the website suggested this quote to me wat da heck i wasn't lost in this pic i was fine
Henry David Thoreau
Contact
you can contact me
I live in Madison, WI