Paul Vangelisti

Born in 1945, Paul Vangelisti received a bachelor's degree from the University of San Francisco and a master's in Literature from the University of Southern California.

His many works of poetry include Days Shadows Pass (Green Integer, 2007), Agency (2003), Embarrassment of Survival: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (2001), Alphabets (1999), Nemo (1995), Villa (1991), Rime (1983), Another You (1980), Portfolio: With an Appendix, The Tender Continent (1978), among others.

He worked as an editor and reporter for The Hollywood Reporter before taking on the position of Cultural Affairs Director for the Los Angeles radio station, KPFK, where he was able to produce "Los Angeles Theater of the Ear," a program which broadcasted poetry readings by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Patchen, and others.

Vangelisti has edited several anthologies of poetry as well as the journals Invisible City and Ribot. His first Los Angeles based collection, Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972), was co-edited with Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski. He is also the editor of Italian Poetry After 1975 (Sun & Moon Press, 1995), New Polish Poetry (1986), Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones 1961-1995 (1995), and the forthcoming Nuova poesia americana, an anthology of U. S. poetry from the 1960s to the present.

He has received numerous awards for his translations from Italian, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as Italy's Flaiano Prize and the PEN USA Prize for Translation in 2006. In 2010, Vangelisti received the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Adriano Spatola, collected in The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992 (Green Integer, 2008).

Currently, Vangelisti lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Founding Chair of the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design.