MFA Writing Program Visiting Artist Series: Melissa Buzzeo

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Melissa Buzzeo has worked as a counselor, curator, professor and palm reader.  She has taught at Naropa University, Iowa Writers Workshop, Pratt and Brown University, and has been a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts.  Her first full-length work, What Began Us, was published by Leon Works in 2007. A second, Face, was published by BookThug in 2009.  Translated into both French and Catalan, she is the author of three chapbooks:  In the Garden of The Book, City M. and Near: a luminescence.  Her work has appeared online in Tarpulin Sky and Trickhouse. A new book, For Want and Sound, is forthcoming this year from Les Figues Press.  Her current work, The Devastation, is based on the fallibility of a single image: a sea-wreck in language. If water is desire, connectivity, the possibility of current, language itself, what happens when that water is emptied out, when nothing is left but the basin of retrieval, the properties of the body and the memory of matter, addressed.   Ms. Buzzeo currently lives in Brooklyn.