Reading: Chris Campanioni with Rachel King & Kevin Maloney
About north by north/west:
Chris Campanioni's new book is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction assembled as several iterative sequences—a discontinuous itinerary—of exile. Harnessing both montage and collage to represent the incohesive experience of being between cultures, categories, and language, this book is a personal, critical, and autoethnographic exploration of diasporic identity formation and creative expression amidst the cultural and political impacts of Cold War colonialism and fragmentation. As the narrator begins work on a rough translation of the 1959 film North by Northwest, focal points surface through textual correspondences with distant coordinates, shifting between close readings of Whitney Houston's early music videos, current events reportage, illness journals, eighties spy movies, the most recent solar eclipse, Alfred Hitchcock’s unproduced films, Cold War "stay-behind operations," an ill-fated party at the Festival de Cannes, and family accounts of migration. These meticulously arranged narrative threads—harnessing elements of a novel alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes—attempt to discompose the epistemology of the West/Global North in order to conceptualize a genre of work by the children of exiles who have been called "the post-dictatorship generation."
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Campanioni is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013); the Pushcart Prize for "Soft Opening" from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016); and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize.
Rachel King is the author of the novel People Along the Sand and the linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven, winner of a 2023 Colorado Book Award and finalist for a 2024 Oregon Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, and Northwest Review. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Kevin Maloney is the author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, Jan 2023), Horse Girl Fever (CLASH Books, Jan 2025), and Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist, 2015). At times a TJ Maxx associate, grocery clerk, outdoor school instructor, organic farmer, electrician, high school English teacher, and teddy bear salesman, Kevin currently works as a web developer and writer. His fiction has appeared in Fence, Barrelhouse, HAD, Forever Mag, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, five blocks from his very hot and talented fiancée Ryan-Ashley Anderson.
Event Links
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