Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry: Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018), The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Their book Essay will be published in 2025. Their most recent chapbook Three Novenas was published by auric books in 2022. 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 the “ESB” Fellowship program they founded at The Poetry Project in 2013.
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 small non-profit farm where they are also a volunteer cow groomer.
Photo by Heather Gibbons 2024
Photo by Ted Roeder 2023