We’re delighted to announce that the CSU Poetry Center has acquired a new manuscript of poetry by Stacy Szymaszek. The collection About the House will appear in our 2026 catalog, alongside Vanesha Pravin’s Gold Country.
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, grant writer, and teacher. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where in 1999 she started working for Woodland Pattern Book Center. In 2005, she moved to NYC to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where she served as Executive Director from 2007-2018.
In addition to About the House, Szymaszek is the author of nine other books of poetry including Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books, The Pasolini Book (2022), and Essay (forthcoming, 2025). 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 Queer Art Mentorship and the mentorship program they founded at The Poetry Project.
With her partner, the poet Kimberly Alidio, 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 non-profit farm where they are also a volunteer cow groomer.
