Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts to rethink the way language shapes our relation to the built and natural environments, and the ways languages may be reshaped to imagine a more just entwinement with the planet. 

She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014), a study of the seemingly outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for experiments across literature, politics, urbanism, and the visual arts, which the Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize committee described as “a scholarly quarry of a city fabled in the literary history and cultural memory of Europe.” Her translations and scholarly glosses of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and won the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize for translation. She founded, and  curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry.

Her poetry has been engaged by critics in the US, Brazil, Canada, Chile, England, France, Italy, Mexico, Poland, and Romania, and translated into various languages, with a bilingual Italian-English chapbook, Ode oggettuale / Thing Ode, published by La Camera Verde in 2008, and a French edition in progress for joca seria. Her poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and the cross-media documentary poem The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2016), which investigates the underworlds of two landfills: the storied Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, and the unknown, yet far more noxious Superfund-listed dump across from her childhood home on Long Island. Her cross-genre work in progress, Pennies from Nether, investigates the leaden pathways of copper exploitation subtending the so-called “cloud.” Pennies from Nether was a finalist for the 2023 Creative Capital Award in Literature.

An interest in language’s materiality and its material consequences in our public and private lives has led her to verbal experiments encompassing collage, installation, video, book arts, painting, Zoom puppetry, interactive digital media, and dance. She has developed interactive and site-specific poetry both solo and in collaboration with other artists at locations ranging from Counterpath Gallery (2019) to the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019, 2017), WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles (2013), Fresh Kills Landfill (2010-11) and the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct under Rome’s Janiculum Hill (2011). Her most recent poetry publication is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), a free e-chapbook which contains a libretto composed for mixed-reality performance with artist/poetic technologists Judd Morrissey and Aviva Avnisan.

Scappettone’s recent writings can be found in journals such as alfabeta2, Boston Review, boundary2, Critical Inquiry, e-flux, and PMLA; in the collections becoming-Feral, Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, Reading Experimental Writing, Geopoetics in Practice, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, Poetics and Precarity, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, Terrain Vague: The Interstitial as Site, Concept, Intervention, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; and in the catalog for the US Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Dimensions of Citizenship. 

She has been a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Millay Colony, the iLAND foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, the Stanford Center for the Humanities, the New York Department of Sanitation, and the American Academy in Rome, among other honors. She is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing and Romance Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, as well as of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. She is currently Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel, researching the geopoetics of urban watersheds.