Artists Space

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His most recent books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem and the collaboration Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, translational, and scholarly arts, and is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts and Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books, including Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia UP, 2025), The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016), a cross-genre documentary of two New York landfills, and From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009). Her translations and critical work surrounding a polyglot refugee from Fascist Italy in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi Book Award. She has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct on Rome’s Janiculum Hill to Michigan’s Quincy Copper Mine, and her visual poetry has been installed and performed at venues ranging from the Kunstverein München (Munich) to 6018|North (Chicago) and the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art (New York). Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), featuring librettos for mixed-reality performance with Judd Morrissey and Ava Aviva Avnisan, and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009), both of which are available for download free of charge. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature.