ABOUT

photo: Christine Taylor

Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar, the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and of several chapbooks: Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e chap kollektiv, 2007), Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007), and Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale (La Camera Verde, 2008), translated into Italian in dialogue with Marco Giovenale. Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-up pastorals, is in progress for Atelos Press; a letterpress scroll from these poems and pop-ups is forthcoming later in 2012 from Compline Press. She edited Belladonna Elders Series #5:  Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009), featuring her pop-ups and prose and new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian. Her poetry is featured in a range of anthologies, including Novas Poéticas de Resistência/Poetics of Resistance, edited by Graça Capinha, Emergency Index, a documentary performance anthology (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), La alteración del silencio: Poesía norteamericana reciente (Das Kapital, 2010), War and Peace (O Books, 2007, 2009), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), and The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004). Her poetry has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish.

Scappettone edited a dossier on contemporary Italian poetry of research for Aufgabe 7 (2008), and has translated extensively from the “Babeling deeply felt” of the postwar polyglot author Amelia Rosselli. Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press), which she edited and translated, was awarded the biennial Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize by the Academy of American Poets.

Scappettone has collaborated with the Difforme Ensemble (Marco Ariano, Renato Ciunfrini, Roberto Fega) on sonic interpretations and performances of Exit 43, and with AGENCY Architecture (Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller) and composer Paul Rudy on the installations X Locus and X Locus (Abluvion) for the courtyard and tract of Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome. In collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater and architect Seung Jae Lee she is at work on a series of research-based performative acts surrounding the transformation of distressed landscape from a site of trauma to a commons: PARK, the recipient of residencies from the iLAND Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, Freshkills Park, and other organizations, was presented in 2010-2011 at Dance Theater Workshop, Reed College, and Fresh Kills Landfill, with further presentations forthcoming in 2013. Scappettone’s visual works have been exhibited in Berkeley, Brussels, Chicago, Ghent, and Nagoya. A range of readings and talks may be found at her PennSound page.

Her critical study, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, presents the apparently obsolescent city as a locus of seduction and repulsion for post-Romantic Anglo-American and European authors—and as a crucible for modernist and postmodern experiments spanning literature, politics, the visual arts, architecture, and urbanism. Killing the Moonlight is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Scappettone has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Wesleyan University, the University of Virginia Young Writers’ Workshop, and the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, and as of July 2013, is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Associate Faculty of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. She was in residence at the American Academy in Rome as the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies in 2010-11.