V. Penelope Pelizzon

V. Penelope Pelizzon is an American poet, and professor.

Life

She graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst, summa cum laude, University of California, Irvine, and University of Missouri in 1998.

She has taught at University of California, Irvine, University of Missouri, Washington and Jefferson College, and University of Connecticut.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, 5 Fingers Review, The Kenyon Review, Field, the New England Review, Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, Worchester Review, and Fourth Genre.

She is married to Anthony Deaton, a Political Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria.

Awards

• 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award, for Nostos, by Poetry Society of America’s
• Hollis Summers Prize
• 1997 “Discovery”/ The Nation Award
• The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award (for Umberto Saba’s poems from Italian)
• 2003 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize
• Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship

Reviews

Penelope Pelizzon's first book of poems--winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize--sticks closely to the narrative of nostalgia and return she sets up in the first of four sections of the collection. The poems are intentionally domesticated in the way people become in pictures, and she uses photographic memory to resonant effect. The book is dedicated to her family and to the memory of her father, which seems appropriate, as the first two sections deal with family history and photographs, following an emigrating family through a lens made murky by the past.

In Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives, V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West bring some long-overdue attention to the distinctly modern and distinctly urban phenomenon of the tabloid newspaper. Concentrating on the late 1920s and early 1930s, when papers like Hearst's Daily Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden's Evening Graphic were at their most popular, the authors use a combination of narrative and film theory to repair the neglect of the academic community by illustrating how these sensationally written, explicitly illustrated newspapers created narratives that influenced more respectable forms of media. This concentration upon forms other than the newspapers is both the book's great strength and its weakness, for in a sense this book is about everything but the tabloids; resultantly it falls into the very pattern of avoidance that the authors hope to correct.

External links

• "V. Penelope Pelizzon", Fishouse audio archive