In Conversation: Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Sasha Waters

Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Sasha Waters: A Handsome Life

In this conversation poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi and filmmaker Sasha Waters will discuss Sasha’s American Masters documentary about Mary Oliver (forthcoming Spring 2026) as a means of entering into the good deep work of figuring what one might mean by “a handsome life”: a phrase that Oliver coined and that seems as profound and good a way to live as any. We’ll talk poems and process, story and mystery. More than anything it will be a chance to think about the vessel of making and the friends (living and dead) that we make along the way.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.

Sasha Waters

Sasha Water‘s latest film, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, is the first documentary portrait of the beloved American poet. The film shares never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks and correspondence from her archive, as well as readings by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Josh Hamilton, John Waters, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey, and interviews with former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, writer and MacArthur Fellow Jason Reynolds, Mary’s old friend Maria Shriver, and many more. Saved by the Beauty of the World can be seen at film festivals and on the PBS series American Masters in 2026.

She has received support from the Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision, the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner, the Denver Film Society, the NEA, the NEH, the Jerome Foundation, and more. Her first film Whipped – a portrait of three dominatrixes in 1990s NYC – was funded in part by Sub Pop Records, selected for the first-ever Sundance Producers conference, and aired nationally on the Sundance Channel. Her next film, Razing Appalachia, was the first-ever feature documentary about the devastations wrought by mountaintop strip mining and aired nationally on Independent Lens. She has been a Fellow in residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; was awarded a 2019-20 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and was the 2016 recipient of the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium.

A professor of Film and Art Foundation at VCUarts in Richmond, Sasha is included in Edited By: Women Film Editors, a survey of women who “invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing,” and in the FemEx Film Archive, an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers.