Sarah Gambito
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Bio
Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Loves You (Persea Books), Delivered (Persea Books), and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, POETRY, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and other journals. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers, the Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts from the Asian American Arts Alliance, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She is Associate Professor of English/Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University and co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving writers and readers of Asian-American literature.
In the photos, I am five or six and lifting up my little sister to so many water fountains. We are laughing and laughing. I’ve always felt that my work has been to lift others up. I know myself to be an artist and an arts advocate. These identities power each other. It’s easy, though, to forget the self and forget my own work and words. I’m deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for lifting me up. Thank you for this push across and to the water.
"Charlottesville Curriculum"
I am afraid of your transcendental death.
When people say think of a man. I think of a brown man.
Sometimes the earth grows khella because she can feel our suffering.
Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis.
When people say think of a man. I think of a white man.
I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain.
Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis.
I was drunk holding my teeth in like students.
I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain.
You die like an actor.
I was drunk holding my teeth in like students.
My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water.
You die like an actor.
I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person.
My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water.
Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme.
I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person.
Where does it hurt, we say.
Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme.
I am afraid of your transcendental death.