PAOLO VALESIO is the author, among several other works, of seventeen books of poetry and is the Giuseppe Ungaretti Professor Emeritus in Italian Literature at Columbia University. He was the founder, and coordinator for ten years, of the ＂Yale Poetry Group＂ at Yale University, and the founder and director of the journal Yale Italian Poetry, whose successor is the Italian Poetry Review-a ＂plurilingual journal of creativity and criticism＂ based in New York and in Florence, Italy-of which Valesio is the editor in chief; he is also the President of the ＂Centro Studi Sara Valesio＂ in Bologna. For his Italian translations, TODD PORTNOWITZ has earned fellowships from the Academy of American Poets (Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, 2015) and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared widely in literary reviews and journals, including Poetry, PN Review, Asymptote, Guernica, VQR, Southwest Review, Agni, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York, where he hosts a reading series for writer-translators,