Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone was born in New York, New York. She is a poet, translator, and writer of lyrical prose who works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts. She grew up across the street from a toxic dump listed as a National Priority Site by the Environmental Protection Agency—a fact that has triggered her recent and ongoing poetic projects.

Scappettone’s translations of the polyglot poet and refugee Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize by the Academy of American Poets. Scappettone’s book The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2017) is a visual-verbal archaeology of hazardous waste sites that combines poetry, literary nonfiction, and collage. She is also the author of the poetry collections From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: Two Acts (The Elephants, 2018), as well as the editor and translator of a special feature on contemporary Italian experimental poetry for Aufgabe, no. 7 (Litmus, 2008). Her book Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, a study of the flooded city as a crucible for utopian schemes across literature, politics, the arts, architecture, and urbanism, was released by Columbia University Press in 2014. 

Scappettone is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Chicago and is affiliated with several other programs, including those in Romance languages and literatures; gender and sexuality studies; and environment, geography and urbanization.