Lina M. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad Creek Books, as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in various journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Chicago, where she works as an assistant professor for the University of Chicago.
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014), a study of the seemingly outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for experiments across literature, politics, urbanism, and the visual arts, which the Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize committee described as “a scholarly quarry of a city fabled in the literary history and cultural memory of Europe.” 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 poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and the cross-media documentary poem The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2016). She founded, and now curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry. She has developed interactive and site-specific poetry both solo and in collaboration with other artists at locations ranging from the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018) to the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019, 2017), Fresh Kills Landfill (2010-11) and the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct under Rome’s Janiculum Hill (2011); SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018) contains a libretto composed for mixed-reality performance with artist/technologists Judd Morrissey and Abraham Avnisan. She has been a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Millay Colony, the iLAND foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, the Stanford Center for the Humanities, the New York Department of Sanitation, and the American Academy in Rome, among other honors. She is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing and Romance Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She keeps an archive online at https://oikost.com.