Chessy Normile
Poetry writer, teacher, and reader
Editor of Girl Blood Info Zine
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Photo by Courtney Allen
Chessy Normile is the author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize), named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020 in The New York Times and included in the 16th Annual Look at Debut Poets in Poets & Writers Magazine. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Poetry Review, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Poets.org, Narrative, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Proceedings of the Ordinary Annual General Meeting, was published by After Hours Editions in 2024. She received a BA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in poetry with a secondary concentration in playwriting from The Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize. Chessy lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she moved to be the 2022-23 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow with the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison and where she is now the 2025-26 Wisconsin's Own Poet-in-Residence at Ripon College.
Photo by Sarah Matthes
Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
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