Stacie Cassarino


Stacie Cassarino is an American poet, literary critic, and professor. She is the author of the collection of poems, Zero at the Bone, and Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature.

Background

Born in Hartford, Connecticut of Italian heritage, she is a dual citizen of the US/ Italy. She has lived in Venice CA, Brooklyn NY, Seattle WA, and Portland OR, and abroad in Italy, England, Costa Rica, and Brazil. She is a graduate of Middlebury College, University of Washington, and UCLA. She has taught at UCLA, Fairfield University, and Pratt Institute, and currently teaches in the English & American Literatures Department at Middlebury College. She was formerly a Copy Editor at ELLE.com. She has also worked as a private chef, and cooked at Babbo in New York City.
She currently lives in Vermont with her three daughters.

Work

Her collection of poetry, Zero at the Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2009 to critical acclaim. It won a 2010 Lambda Literary Award, and the Audre Lorde Award.
In 2005, she won the "Discovery"/The Nation Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize, was nominated for the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2007, and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also received a major award from the Astraea Foundation Writer's Fund.
Her poetry, which deals with subjects such as place, desire, and loss, has been published in notable literary journals such as The New Republic, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, AGNI and the Comstock Review. Her poem "Summer Solstice" was featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writers’ Almanac on NPR in 2011.
Her work has been widely commented on, by poets such as the British writer Glyn Maxwell who reviewed the collection stating: "Cassarino's voice ranges far and near, from the gasp and sigh of creaturely love to the dizzying spaces of American distance, whiteness, silence. Few poets these days can draw their lines so strongly..."
Her second book, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century Literature, connects foodscapes to aesthetic movements, demonstrating how American writers responded to the changing tastes of the nation.