Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. Widely considered to be one of the most significant Italian poets, she has been awarded several national prizes. Four of her books have appeared in English in John Taylor’s translations: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here(2019), The Butterfly Cemetery (2022), and All the Eyes that I Have Opened (2024). Mancinelli has been selected for several important international programs, including the European poetry platform “Versopolis,” the Chair Poet in Residence (Calcutta, India), the European project “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes,” and the “Ephemera” Writing Workshop in Bucharest. Her writing, which regularly appears in English-language poetry journals, is also featured in the University of Oxford project “Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana dal 1970 a oggi,” edited by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti, as well as in Europe in Poems: The Versopolis Anthology, edited by Patrick McGuinness (Arc Publications-Beletrina Academic Press, 2020).
John Taylor is an American writer, critic, and translator who lives in France. Among his many translations of Italian, Modern Greek, and French poetry are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, José-Flore Tappy, Charline Lambert, Béatrice Douvre, Pierre Voélin, Georges Perros, Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, Veroniki Dalakoura, Lorenzo Calogero, and Alfredo de Palchi. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press), A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review Press), which is a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, and What Comes from the Night (Coyote Arts Press).
