Chris Vitiello is a poet, writer, critic, performer, and independent curator based in Durham, North Carolina. His poetry books include Nouns Swarm a Verb, Irresponsibility, and Obedience. His literary life also extends into public performance, visual-arts criticism, community events, and the long-running Poetry Fox persona.
Vitiello’s work occupies a distinctive place among contemporary poets because the page, the live event, the typewriter, the gallery, and the city all become possible sites for poetry. His writing often pays close attention to statement, measurement, syntax, attention, and the instability that enters language when apparently plain sentences are examined closely.
Irresponsibility
Ahsahta Press published Irresponsibility in 2008. The book works through dated and located pieces that bring everyday surroundings into contact with music, science, observation, thought, and the problem of describing experience accurately. Its language can sound direct while repeatedly testing the assumptions hidden inside ordinary statements.
This interest in attention and linguistic instability connects Vitiello’s work with broader traditions of experimental poetry, where the procedures of thinking and writing become part of the poem’s visible action.
Obedience
Obedience, also published by Ahsahta Press, continued Vitiello’s investigation of declarative language, conceptual pressure, and the relation between a sentence and the world it claims to describe. Together with Irresponsibility and the earlier Nouns Swarm a Verb, the book forms a substantial body of poetry built around precision, doubt, and verbal play.
The Poetry Fox
As the Poetry Fox, Vitiello appears at public events in costume and writes custom poems on vintage typewriters. The project has produced tens of thousands of poems and turns poetry into a direct social exchange: a person offers a prompt, and a poem is written in real time.
The Poetry Fox brings the intimacy of a poem into festivals, markets, museums, civic events, and other public settings. That practice expands Vitiello’s work beyond the book while preserving the essential encounter between language, attention, and an individual reader.
Performance and visual art
Vitiello’s performance installation The Language Is Asleep won the 2017 ArtPrize Pitch Night and was presented at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, with later versions appearing in other art settings. His participatory projects also include the Writing Cabinet, an installation that receives written worries, memories, hopes, and questions and returns poetic responses.
Criticism and Durham
Alongside poetry, Vitiello has written extensively about visual art and performance. He received the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism in 2017. In 2024, Durham appointed him the city’s second Poet Laureate for a three-year term.
His career joins literary writing to a sustained public arts practice. Readers interested in the wider American context can continue through Shampoo’s guide to American poetry and the magazine’s broader poets archive.