MEET STACY SZYMASZEK
“I have always believed in a pedagogy of decentering… I love mentoring because it honors my own experience of learning how to be a poet in the world through informal and transient mentoring and self-education.”
Stacy Szymaszek, courtesy of the artist.
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry: Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018), The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Their book Essay will be published in 2025. Their most recent chapbook Three Novenas was published by auric books in 2022. They are the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry, and are a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. They enjoy teaching and mentoring younger poets and have done both in a wide variety of contexts, including, recently, for the “ESB” Fellowship program they founded at The Poetry Project in 2013. They live in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. Szymaszek is the Development Director for a small non-profit farm where they are also a volunteer cow groomer.
Work
“ESSAY,” (2023) — excerpt of a book length poem forthcoming in 2025 with Krupskaya Books
Mentor Profile
Queer|Art|Mentorship will be accepting applications from emerging artists across the country. Are you open to working with someone remotely, or would you prefer they are based in the same city as you?
“I am open to working remotely. If the person is in NYC, I go there often enough to set up meetings.”
What interests you about mentoring?
“I have always believed in a pedagogy of decentering when I teach at universities and organizations, which I scarcely do anymore. I love mentoring because it honors my own experience of learning how to be a poet in the world through informal and transient mentoring and self-education/self-study. I love being able to share what I know about language and form and making and publishing books with young or early career LGBTQIA+ people. The one on one relationship holds a lot of potential for mutual transformative learning.”
Given your experience and interests, what kind of emerging artist do you feel best positioned to support?
“I'm most interested in artists who center language in their practice and who are interested in thinking through different ways to present the written word in a very complex and rapidly changing (often corrupt and crumbling) publication and distribution industry.”
As a mentor, what would you like to offer an emerging artist? What would you like to receive?
“I'd like to offer my time and attention. My care. Good humor. My experiences over the past 35 years of publishing with presses, running readings series, editing journals, and reading in public. And, if of interest, my experience running an arts org. I feel like mentoring helps me feel young because it challenges a calcifying process. I don't like to rest on laurels. So I think I'm saying I like to be benevolently challenged to keep curious and open and invited to share in another human's creative process.”
Have you had mentors of your own? Who have they been?
“I never had a mentor in any formalized way like an MFA or a program like QAM. I started corresponding by letter with the poet and artist Etel Adnan in the early 2000s--until her death in 2021. Over the course of those years we also met in person whenever we could--in Paris, NYC, or Sausalito. She saw me as part of her poet family at a point when I hadn't published much yet. I like this about mentorship - a mutual recognition of spirit. I didn't ever have to prove myself to her.”