italian

Antonio Malatesti (1610 – 1672) was a Florentine poet. His collection of riddles, Una Corona di Enigmi, was published in 1640. La Tina, a sequence of bawdy rustic sonnets, was dedicated to John Milton and presented to him in manuscript; a new edition, edited from this text by Davide Messina, was published in 2014. Malatesti’s later verse was collected in the posthumous Brindisi dei Ciclopi (1673).

Kate Light’s poetry collections are The Laws of Falling Bodies (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 1997), Open Slowly (2003), and Gravity’s Dream (Donald Justice Award, 2006). A professional violinist, she is also the librettist of The Life and Loves of Joe Coogan, an opera based on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show; Once Upon the Wind, based on a Russian folk tale; and Einstein’s Mozart: Two Geniuses.

Michael Palma has published two poetry chapbooks, The Egg Shape and Antibodies; two full-length collections, A Fortune in Gold and Begin in Gladness; and an online chapbook, The Ghost of Congress Street. His fourteen translations of modern Italian poets include prizewinning volumes of Guido Gozzano and Diego Valeri with Princeton University Press, as well as books by Maurizio Cucchi, Franco Buffoni, Paolo Valesio, Maura Del Serra, and others. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals and over thirty anthologies.

Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest poets. His Vita Nova (c. 1292 – 95), a combination of prose and poetry that tells the story of his youthful love for Beatrice, was his first book. In 1295 he entered Florentine politics and in the summer of 1300 he became one of the six governing Priors of Florence, the highest political office. During this time, he was also writing the numerous lyric poems that made him famous in central and northern Italy, as well as studying widely and deeply in a number of subjects.

Andrew Frisardi is originally from Boston and now lives in northern Lazio, Italy, where he works as a writer, translator, and editor. His most recent books are an annotated translation of Dante’s Vita Nova, published by Northwestern University Press in 2012; The Young Dante and the One Love, essays on the Vita Nova published by the Temenos Academy (London) in 2013; and Death of a Dissembler, a poetry collection published in 2014 by White Violet Press.