Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, performed, 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 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), as well as of the critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014) and of the forthcoming Poetry After Barbarism: Fascism, the Xenoglossic Word, and the Invention of a Motherless Tongue. In 2009 she edited Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, including her pop-ups alongside a critical essay and poems by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian. Her translations 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), 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 recent work can be found in  Becoming-feral, Chicago Review, e-flux, Geopoetics in Practice, House Party, Nuovi argomenti, Poetics and Precarity, Three Fold Press, and Visible Binary. Scappettone has collaborated with dancers, code artists, architects, and musicians on site-specific works at locations ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct below the Janiculum Hill to Fresh Kills Landfill. Her most recent chapbook is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: Two Acts, a free downloadable text from The Elephants hailing from a libretto composed for “mixed-reality” performance with writer and code artist Judd Morrissey and artist/technologist Ava Aviva Avnisan. In 2018 she and collaborators from SMOKEPENNY installed LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well at the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts and at Counterpath Gallery in Denver; in 2022 her work with choreographer Kathy Westwater and Seung-Jae Lee on PARK was featured at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York. Scappettone teaches literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago, and has served as Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel. Find her ongoing online archive here.