Additional information
by Celeste Gainey (Author)
Light is the preoccupation, vocation, and language of the GAFFER, the debut collection of poems by Celeste Gainey, the first woman gaffer to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the preeminent craft union in the motion picture industry. These poems vividly depict the gaffer's terrain from the set of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, to Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and The Wiz, to a lighting session with Lucille Ball. In these poems is the quest for identity and synchronicity within the imagined and experimental realm of light and cinema, and the immutable physical world where notions of gender, sex, desire, and ambition are prescribed a priori. the GAFFER deconstructs the idea of outsider as pioneer--then runs with it.
Author Biography
Celeste Gainey is the author the chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in BLOOM, 5AM, and Columbia Poetry Review. Graduating with a BFA in Film & Television from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, as well as earning an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Carlow University, Gainey has spent over thirty-five years working with light--as a gaffer for motion pictures and as an architectural lighting designer.
