Last February, Swarthmore alum Bobby Zipp ’18 wrote an article in The Phoenix about the broken relationship between students, alumni, and career services. He mentioned that attempts to connect students and alumni lack simplicity and fluidity, among other problems, boiling down to an eroded sense of community and connection on both ends. A current student he spoke to didn’t know of Garnet Weekend, saying the event seemed like something for students with local parents, or for athletes. I’m an athlete, and although I haven’t had the chance to meet any alumni at Garnet Weekend, I was privileged enough to meet a few tennis alums over pickleball and Sharples at our Alumni Day last fall. I’ll be interviewing them via Zoom on life after Swarthmore, what they got out of their liberal education, and more — and maybe these answers will be helpful to all the other students who didn’t attend Garnet Weekend, who aren’t athletes, who would like connection or answers or a little bit of both. This idea is partly inspired by an old alumni series through The Johnnie Chair at St. John’s College.
Graze Digazio is a graduate of the Swarthmore Class of 2022, currently pursuing a poetry MFA at the New School.
Did you end up home after graduation? You said you didn’t have anything specific in mind yet?
I actually moved in with my partner after graduation. He had a job in San Francisco. And so I started doing an online, hybrid marketing job for a small independent press. And I did that for about a year until I started a creative writing teaching position through a nonprofit organization called 826 Valencia in San Francisco. So I was in San Francisco for two years.
Where are you from originally?
I’m from Delaware.
Had you ever been on the West Coast before?
I had been [there] for a three-month internship. I’d lived in LA, but San Francisco is a little bit different. I enjoyed it. There was really good food. It was beautiful. There’s a lot of good hiking and stuff. But I knew I didn’t want to be there long term. I’m in New York now and have been for a year and a half. I moved here when I got into my MFA program at The New School.
What did you major in at Swarthmore?
English literature, with an emphasis in creative writing.
That’s amazing. That’s what I’m doing as well. So you’re currently an MFA student at The New School. Is the experience what you expected? Which parts of it have been fulfilling or disappointing so far, both creatively speaking and as a school in general? This is your first time back in school since Swarthmore, right?
Yes. It has actually exceeded all of my expectations. I know that MFA programs can be kind of a hit or miss, or at least that’s what I’ve heard from creative writing, especially because it’s a masters. I’m on partial scholarship, but still paying for it too, which is another thing. But I feel like the writing community here has been wonderful; the New York, Greenwich area at large, but also specifically the school and the program. The faculty has been amazing. I’ve been doing research with a faculty member, which has been really exciting. I’ve been taking a lot of electives. So I feel like the creative space and the intellectual rigor has been great. And the New School is also super interdisciplinary-focused. So I’ve been able to take classes in the liberal studies and philosophy departments in addition to the creative writing department. It’s been really creatively and intellectually fulfilling.
Do you have a focus on poetry or fiction or both?
Poetry.
How long have you been creatively writing for? When did you know that you wanted to pursue it on a serious basis through something like an MFA?
I started creative writing in college. I took an intro poetry creative writing class with Nat Anderson. And that really inspired me to continue writing poetry and trying to pursue the emphasis at Swarthmore. And then my senior year at Swarthmore, I decided I wanted to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. So I think it was probably by my final year there that I was like, okay, I can see myself continuing to do this and wanting to continue the practice.
Did Swarthmore influence or change your creative understandings or ambitions? Do you think the professors in general had a big role? Are you in a similar place now as you were creatively while in school, or has your focus changed a lot?
[It has] definitely shifted a lot, and some of that is just getting older and continuing to write and work with new faculty. But I feel pretty strongly that I originally got the tools that I needed to get into creative writing and understand formal techniques and generally begin to find my voice at Swat.
I also did an independent guided study at Swarthmore with Craig Williamson. He worked with me on my poetry. I think that’s why I felt like I got the tools to begin writing on my own. And then that gave me the energy to pursue it at a different level.
Which themes or ideas do you tend to focus on in your work?
I’m really interested in digital poetics now, actually, and hybrid poetics. Hybrid poetics are genre-defying, formal-defying, and incorporating different disciplines. So poetry that includes visual art or poetry that can be translated in a performance or things like that. But particularly in my work, I’m interested in feminist poetics and techno-poetics and embodiment in the anthropocene and thinking about the ways that we’re networked beings. I’m interested in emerging technologies, embodiment, and desire.
This might be kind of related. How do you feel about AI, not to make everything about AI, because I feel like everybody’s asking about it right now. But I’m guessing techno-poetics is definitely related to technology. Are you worried about life as a writer beyond the normal worries that everybody has, but specifically in the current creative climate that technology has influenced?
Honestly, I feel like for creative writing, I’m much less worried about it. Within my program, none of us really touch it in that way. Maybe that’s program specific, but I think it’s really hard to get AI to write a good poem. So I’m not so concerned. I mean, who’s really coming and knocking down my door, like, “give me poems.” Right now I’m thinking about xenofeminism, which is kind of like a techno-opimist manifesto about all of the different ways — from 2015 — technology can be usurped and reconfigured so that women and other individuals can use it for liberation. But as we’ve seen, with surveillance technologies and stuff, that’s not how things are in 2025. I’m actually really interested in hybrid art practices as modes of intervention where we can use these technologies, or different hybrid practices in general, to make it more difficult to categorize. So it’s not just a poem or it’s not just a performance. It’s these hybrid modes of art-making that are thinking about intersectionality and opacity, and making it harder to mass extract data and things like that. So it’s thinking about using technologies in more productive ways that are living up to their more productive capacities or liberating capacities, finding ways to intervene in the ways that they’re actually being used right now — for massive surveillance capitalism and things like that.
That sounds so interesting and important. I mean, it also sounds protective against technology in a certain way, which is very important, the way that people’s work is being stolen. That’s sick. Do you have a plan in place for after your MFA is complete?
So I am applying to English Ph.D programs right now, but it’s a tough time to be doing that, and they’re all very competitive. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to start one in the fall, but if not, I’m also applying to some artisan residency, fellowships, just ways that I could keep writing for a year or teaching fellowships. I definitely want to stay in my little hub of writing, doing creative work. I do freelance right now as well, writing content for blogs and things like that. So like, if worse comes to worst, I’ll keep doing that and keep doing my part-time stuff. But yeah, my main hope would be to do an English Ph.D.
Do you know what specific area? Would it be mostly a continuation of the ideas and the things that you’re working on right now?
Yeah, I think it would be a continuation. I’m a little bit, I think, of an oddball because I’m not so much going for a traditional like medievalist or even 20th, 21st century. I’m more interested in gender, women’s studies, or poetry, hybrid poetry specifically. So I am also applying to one or two more interdisciplinary Ph.D programs that would allow me to do more transdisciplinary work because I’m interested in new media too, since I’m doing digital poetics. [I’m looking at] places that I can get a little bit wonky and not be super hyper-specialized, but that’s tough because a Ph.D is very specialized.
That’s very true, but that’s amazing. You probably love academia to a certain extent to be doing it for so long. What’s your part-time job?
I have several. I’m working right now in jobs through the school. Technically, my research assistant position is paid. I’m a community assistant, I help with residential things at one of our student dorms. And then I also do freelance writing for blog content, for a college counseling site that is just trying to give information about how to best write your application, essays, things like that.
How did it feel to come back to Swarthmore last year as an alum? I know it’s only been three years since you graduated. Was it very nostalgic? And did old memories come to surface or does it feel very separate from your current life?
It felt really nice. It was definitely nostalgic because, while I hadn’t been out for that long and Swarthmore is exclusively for undergraduates, it’s kind of like reaching back in time, though I know I can’t get back to this space in the same capacity. So obviously it was beautiful. It was really nice to spend time with the team, see [Coach] Jeremy, catch up with the players now and with friends from the team. But it was definitely nostalgic just because I think having that very unique Swarthmore experience on campus, and it’s a closed campus, and knowing that at that point, you were really a student and that was your main responsibility. Versus once you’re on the other side, I think it just kind of feels like this nice, sort of inaccessible time, but it’s wonderful to be back on campus. I mean, campus is beautiful. And it’s nice to spend time with the team.
So finally, what did you get out of your liberal education at Swarthmore?
That’s probably what I’m most thankful for, honestly, is having these different tools that I was able to use to understand how important it is to investigate different theoretical frameworks, different ways of analyzing and interpreting things, and also just an appreciation for cross-disciplinary study. I think that’s why now I’m really interested in hybrid poetics, which brings in all of these transdisciplinary art practices and modes of making. Also, I’m still interested in pulling things from different fields and talking to different faculty that are thinking about different things in different ways. The New School is super interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, possibly even more so than Swarthmore. I didn’t think I could go somewhere that was more interdisciplinary, but it is. And it’s framed my whole approach to academia, in general, to be resistant to hyperspecialization or staying in one field. I think that the liberal arts education was so important for just opening my mind and teaching me to think in new ways and to question systems. [To] think about all of these things in ways that, maybe if I’d just done English Literature even, I wouldn’t have all of these different lenses.
That’s amazing. Well, those are all of my questions. Thank you so much for meeting with me. And I hope that your Ph.D applications go well.
Thanks. We’ll see. It’s a tough time to be applying, but, yeah fingers crossed. Thanks for taking the time.
Are you a recent or not-so-recent alumni with a good story to share? Contact mposner1@swarthmore.edu.
