Chris Campanioni

Chris Campanioni
Chris Campanioni walking for C-IN2
Born	Manhattan
Occupation	Author, journalist, model

Chris Campanioni is an American writer of Cuban and Polish descent. He is also a model, and a former journalist. He was born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, studied English literature and journalism at Lehigh University, and graduated from the MA program at Fordham University in May 2013. He teaches English literature and fiction writing at College of Staten Island. To date, he has written a novel about fashion and the media titled Going Down (published by Aignos, 2013) and a sequel of interlacing stories and photographs called Fashion of the seasons (forthcoming). He is a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund alumnus and a member of SAG. He has also been photographed for various clothing lines and editorials, and participated in several print and television campaigns, along with runway shows in Manhattan, Miami, and Rio de Janeiro.

Style and Influence

His work is affiliated with the Latin American neo-Surrealists along with Brion Gysin and his cut-up technique. While also hugely influenced by the historic avant-garde (Dada, et al.), the coterie that haunts his first trilogy of novels is the Situationist International. In an interview at Cannes 2010, he said: “I infiltrated these areas of culture for a very specific reason, and that is to write about them from an insider’s perspective, unlike much other journalism or fiction, from the outside looking in.” However, in the cover story for DNA’s Sexiest Man Alive issue (August 2009), he told the magazine that he admired Britney Spears’s acting in Crossroads, so it is difficult to gauge his sincerity in dialogue with the media.

His writing reenacts while recording the interferences that occur daily, whether implicitly or on the intuitive and sensory level of consciousness. His writing responds to the reduction and disintegration of language and consciousness; an attempt to suggest a new way of communicating, which is still taking shape.^[1] His first collection of poems, In Conversation, is forthcoming.

Reactions

The New York Post named Going Down one of its "must-read books" of the month in October.^[2]

Going Down has been lauded by various media, including the Manhattan Times, for its realistic portrayal of the newsroom and the fashion industry from the Latino perspective.^[3] The novel has also garnered some criticism for its dark tone and meta-fiction writing style. ^[4]

In the spring of 2013, Campanioni was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize for In Conversation. From the Academy of American Poets committee:

"Campanioni immediately draws the reader in with a sharp sensibility for the music of language. 'Forty faces, one line' demonstrates an aptitude for poetic structure as well as a contemporary sense of rhyme, and 'Billboards' focuses first in a prose-poem, then in quatrains, on the contrast between the self commodified and the loneliness of the soul inside of the commodified body. By focusing outside and inside the self in refreshing ways, Campanioni offers us meditations on 'body and soul' that include the elegant woman who’s dropped her dentures as well as the child yearning to eat cake. The poem 'Endnotes for Life' takes familiar territory (the story of Lot’s wife, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the personal narrative) and makes a structure for it that calls into question the primacy of narrative in much American poetry. These sharp views of the human theater force us to examine our place in it, and to question what more exists in our own internal worlds."

His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Fjords Review, StatORec, San Francisco Chronicle, The Star-Ledger, The Record (Bergen County), and elsewhere. As an actor he has also appeared on “The Today Show,” “The View,” and in various speaking roles on “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” in addition to commercials ranging from Dentyne Ice to Axe body spray, Ab Roller Evolution and Rocking Abs. He has been photographed for international magazines, books, and catalogues spanning Rio and Milan, Paris and Melbourne, including the cover of DNA. He is most known for his work with C-IN2, a campaign he has shot since June 2007, as well as his work with Tommy Hilfiger and Izod underwear.

Work

In the month leading to the novel's release, Campanioni created an interactive video calendar featuring film adaptations from various scenes in Going Down. The calendar reevaluates the notion of "real time" and also broadens the ways in which readers can respond to and read a text. RealClear's December 2013 feature ("The Model Writer") compared Campanioni's work to Andy Warhol and French New Wave cinema.^[5]

Oradell resident writes new book based on modeling career

^{[1] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]}

References