Jennifer Scappettone

An artist, translator, and teacher, Jennifer Scappettone was born and raised in New York and earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Err-Residence (2007); Beauty (Is the New Absurdity) (2007); Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale (2008), translated into Italian with Marco Giovenale; From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009); The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology & Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016); Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian; Belladonna, 2009); SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (2018), a libretto for “mixed-reality” performance composed using turn-of-the-20th-century mining telegraph codes; and Poetry After Barbarism: Fascism, the Xenoglossic Word, and the Invention of a Motherless Tongue (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

Scappettone has worked solo and in collaboration with musicians, architects, code artists, and dancers on site-specific performance pieces at locations ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the American Academy in Rome, to the Chicago Architecture Biennial, to Fresh Kills Landfill. In her project “Neosuprematist Webtexts” (2008–2009), Scappettone combined filmed stills and fragments of text; selections of the work were included in a show curated by the visual poet Helen White at festivals in Brussels and Ghent. Collagelike practices infuse Scappettone’s From Dame Quickly, which poet Charles Bernstein described as “translation, collage, prose poem, lyric invention, periodic convolute, imploded syntax and discursive veers.” 

Scappettone’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2004; The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007); Zoland Annual (2008); Novas Poéticas de Resistencia (2013); EX.IT: Materiali fuori contesto (2013); The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, new media section (2014); The Best American Experimental Writing 2016; Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (2018); and becoming-Feral (2021).

As a guest editor, Scappettone featured Italian poetry in the journal Aufgabe #7 in 2008, and she is editor of PennSound Italiana. Her translations of the work of Amelia Rosselli from the Italian were published in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, and received the Raiziss/De Palchi Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Scappettone teaches at the University of Chicago.