Chris Campanioni

Chris Campanioni
Campanioni pictured in Eastern Michigan University's hall of distinguished speakers.
Born	Chris Campanioni
Alma mater	Lehigh University, Fordham University
Occupation	Author, teacher, model
Website	www.chriscampanioni.com

Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American writer of Cuban and Polish descent. He was born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, studied English literature and journalism at Lehigh University, and graduated from the MA program at Fordham University in May 2013. He is the Senior Editor of PANK and At Large Magazine, and a lecturer of English literature and creative writing at Baruch College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Pace University. Along with Puerto Rican novelist Jonathan Marcantoni, he runs the YouNiversity, a non-profit digital workshop that provides students access to and experience with the publishing industry through media professionals in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Unlike the curriculum and objectives of many MFA programs across the United States, the YouNiversity focuses on several different facets of a writer's literary development, including real-time interaction with editors, literary agents, graphic artists, publishers, and other readers and writers.

Campanioni's work is affiliated with the Latin American neo-Surrealists along with Brion Gysin and his cut-up technique. While also influenced by the historic avant-garde (Dada, et al.), the coterie that haunts his first trilogy of novels is the Situationist International.

His writing responds to the disintegration of language and consciousness; an attempt to suggest a new way of communicating, which is still taking shape. Campanioni has referenced quotes from William Burroughs to describe his own writing process in interviews, including the emphasis on displacement: "I wrote a trilogy out of order and then rearranged it, because the whole of life is like that--a cut-up--and when you cut into the present, the future leaks out."

His hybrid nonfiction/poetry book Death of Art (C&R Press) was celebrated as "bringing surprise and joy back to Conceptual writing" and "a striking amalgamation of memoir and social critique, poetry and cultural theory." His poem "Transport (after 'When Ecstasy is Inconvenient')" was a finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2015, awarded annually to the U.S. poet whose poem best evokes a connection to place. In March 2014, Campanioni became the youngest finalist for the International Latino Book Awards when Going Down was selected as Best Debut Novel.