
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts. She is the author of the poetry collections The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016), From Dame Quickly, and Smokepenny Lyrichord Heavenbred: Two Acts from (The Elephants, 2018) and editor of Belladonna Elders Series: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna, 2009). She has also authored the critical studies Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice and the forthcoming, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Anti-Fascist Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2014 and 2025). As translator she has published Locomotrix, devoted to the poet-refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and she curates PennSound | Italiana. Scappettone has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the Janiculum Hill to the Quincy Copper Mine in Michigan to Fresh Kills Landfill. She is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago.