Radical Poetry Reading with Luigi Ballerini

Award winning poet, essayist, translator and curator, Luigi Ballerini lives in New York and Milano. His books of poetry include eccetera. E (Guanda, 1972), Che figurato muore (Scheiwiller, 1988), Che oror l’orient (Lubrina, 1991), Il terzo gode (Marsilio, 1994), Shakespeherian Rags (Edizioni di Quasar, 1996), Uno monta la luna (Manni, 2001), Cefalonia (Mondadori 2005), Se il tempo è matto (Mondadori 2010), Una dozzina di scherzi +3 (Montanari, 2012), and Apelle figlio d’apollo (Cento Amici del Libro, 2016).

Writer Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She serves as the faculty liaison and educational facilitator for the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. Briante also produces and hosts the radio program Speedway and Swan, an hour of free-form poetry and music on KXCI 91.3 Tucson.

Poet and writer John Latta is the author of Rubbing Torsos (Ithaca House 1979) and Breeze (University of Notre Dame Press 2003). Between 2006 and 2015, he regularly assembled notes and quotes for a blog called Isola di Rifiuti. A recent longish sequence called “Notes Written in June” is at Blackbox Manifold. It is part of a book-length work tentatively titled Notes for General Circulation. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he routinely tramps the woodlots and river banks, birding.

Poet Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems—including A Doll for Throwing and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—a translation of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and a translation of Purgatorio. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where she teaches creative writing. Colonies of Paradise, translations of poems by the German poet and novelist Matthias Göritz, is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books in 2022.

Poet, writer, journalist , playwright, visual artist, teacher, and author Maria Grazia Calandrone (Milan, 1964) writes for “Corriere della Sera” and “7.” Since 2010 she has disseminated poetry to RaiRadio3 in programs such as “Da poeta a poeta,” a sound anthology of contemporary poetry, and “Esercizi di poesia,” innovative school of poetry open to listeners. She co-directs Aragno Editore’s “i domani” series, is on the editorial board of Poesia, and is Crocetti Editore and juror of the Pagliarani and Musicultura awards. She is the director of the series of interviews I volontari, a documentary on welcoming migrants, and of the videoreportage on Sarajevo Viaggio in una guerra non finita, both published by Corriere TV.