Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985 and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Chris is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013), the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening,” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016), and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize.
His work on regimes of surveillance, queer migration, and the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces has been published by Diacritics, Social Identities, Life Writing, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, presented at MIT’s Media in Transition biennial, NYU’s Diasporic Poetics symposium, Derrida Today, and the &Now festival of innovative writing, and profiled by Technoculture. He is the recipient of the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary work as well as numerous fellowships, including a Mellon Foundation fellowship and an IRADAC fellowship to join the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Since 2020, he’s worked with the Transnational Joint Research Center for Migration, Logistics, and Cultural Intervention, where he continues to broach the multiple, intersecting, and extant repercussions of the Cold War.
His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays (HarperCollins, 2022), BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Latin American Literature Today, Catapult, Social Text, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Fence, Ambit, Southern Humanities Review, Massachusetts Review, Nat. Brut, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, 3:AM Magazine, DIAGRAM, Poetry International, Prelude, RHINO, and other journals, anthologies, and edited volumes, including Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2019), Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities (Sundress, 2019), Open House: Conversations with Writers About Community (Tupelo Press, 2024), Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen (Berghahn Books, 2023), and Transmedia Selves: Identity and Persona Creation in the Age of Mobile and Multiplatform Media (Routledge, 2023). His translations have been published in Beginnings of the Prose Poem: All Over The Place (Commonwealth Books, 2021), his multimedia work has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art, and the film adaptation of his poem This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival. From 2016 until 2021, he edited PANK and PANK Books, launching PANK’s Folio series in 2019 and its translation imprint, Transmission, in 2021.
Since 2016, he’s served as a MAGNET Mentor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with the goal of getting more students of color into graduate programs in the humanities. He has taught Latinx literature, creative writing, transmedia storytelling, journalism, and composition at Pace University and Baruch College, where he’s been awarded the Diana Colbert Prize for Innovative Teaching (2017), the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching (2018), the Department of English Excellence in Teaching Award (2021), the Graduate Center English Program Citation for Teaching Excellence (2022), and the Barbara Gluck Teaching Excellence Award (2023).
On the horizon is VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a novel about a child’s attempts to recast his parents’ exiles onto interconnected videocassettes, North by North/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a cross between a book-length essay and a multimodal memoir that employs elements of a novel, alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes, which attempts to establish a new genre for migrants and the “post dictatorship generation” of their children, Drift Net (Lever Press), a monograph that theorizes an aesthetics of transmedia in migration, while showing how migrants have forecasted and reshaped new media practices and norms, producing a political subjectivity that resists subjectification, and his debut poetry collection about networked intimacy and media ecologies, Windows 85, launching from Roof Books and the Segue Foundation this fall.
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