Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone works at the crossroads of poetry, research, translation, radical pedagogy, and on-and-off-page arts. Her poetics encompass trans- and semilinguistic forms of making such as collage, trash archaeology, pixelation, embodied performance, film, soundscape production, and choral recitation, often in relation to documentary projects. Litmus published her first book, From Dame Quickly (2009), a response to the post 9/11 United States under Bush. In 2008, she guest-edited a 125-page dossier devoted to Italian contemporary poetry of research for Aufgabe, which solidified many of the relationships that later made it possible for her to found a new sector of PennSound devoted to Italian poetry: PennSound|Italiana. 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. Her second book of poetry, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, published by Atelos in 2016, is the first book of a diptych scoring the environmental, health, and affective impacts of transnational trash and extraction economies, inspired by delving into a Superfund site across the street from her childhood home. Work in progress from the second book was published as SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018); this free downloadable chapbook contains a libretto composed for mixed-reality performance with artists Judd Morrissey and Abraham Avnisan. Scappettone has developed interactive and site-specific poetry solo and in collaboration with choreographers, musicians, designers, and other artists at locations ranging from the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018) to the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019, 2017), Fresh Kills Landfill (2010-present), and the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct under Rome’s Janiculum Hill (2011). In 2014 Columbia University Press published Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, her scholarly archaeology of the way a sinking city at the imagined edge of Europe arrested the modernist imagination. She currently teaches courses in poetry and poetics, ecopoetics and environmental humanities, writing and social change, literature and urbanism, translingualism and experimental translation at the University of Chicago.