2025.10.30 OPR presents:
Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, translational, and scholarly arts, and is a professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of five full-length books, most recently Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia UP, 2025), The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016), and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia UP, 2014). Her translations and critical work surrounding a polyglot refugee from Fascist Italy in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi Book Award. She has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct to Fresh Kills Landfill, and her visual poetry has been installed at venues ranging from the Kunstverein München to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018) and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009), both of which are freely available for download. Her project in progress devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature.