Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone’s writing grapples at the borders of scholarly research, translation, and the literary, visual, and performing arts. She is the author of the critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014) and of the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2017). Her translations of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which won the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Prize; and she curates PennSound Italiana, a section of the audiovisual archive devoted to marginalized and experimental voices in Italian contemporary poetry. Other new work can be found in Asymptote, Boston Review, e-flux, Nuovi argomenti, Poetics and Precarity, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, and in the catalog for the US Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Dimensions of CitizenshipVisual and interactive poems of hers have been installed and performed by dancers and musicians at locations ranging from 6018|North for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), to WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles (2014), to Trajan’s aqueduct in Rome (2011), to Fresh Kills Landfill (2010–11). Her most recent publication is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: Two Acts, a free e-chapbook from The Elephants hailing from a libretto composed for live “mixed-reality” performance with writer and code artist Judd Morrissey and artist/technologist Abraham Avnisan. In Fall 2018 she and her collaborators from SMOKEPENNY have an installation titled LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well featured at the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts exhibition on “Digital Trash.” She is an associate professor working across several departments at the University of Chicago, and a 2018–19 External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Find her online archive here.