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A Conversation and Poetry Reading with Policromia Poets Past and Future

On Friday June 4th the Siena Art Institute's series of online events continues with a poetry reading and conversation.

Mairéad Byrne and Will Schutt, organizers of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute’s annual international festival of poetry and translation, will be talking with award-winning poets John Murillo and Dirceu Villa about the purpose and practice of writing poetry today.

Live streaming on our Facebook and YouTube channels at at 6 p.m. Italy, 5pm UK, 7pm Greece, 9:30 pm India, noon NYC, 9 a.m. LA.

Bios

Mairéad Byrne’s poetry collections include Talk Poetry (Miami University Press), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions), and The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius). Her work has been translated by Dirceu Villa in the collection Famosa na sua cabeça (Dobra Editorial). Recent work includes two chapbooks In & Out (Smithereens 2019) and har sawlya (above/ground 2019); and two essays, “Light in July,” in David (Jhave) Johnston’s ReRites: Raw Output/Responses (Anteism 2019) and “The Shed of Poetry,” in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric (Shearsman 2020). She is a Professor of Poetry at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.  She is a co-curator of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute's annual international festival of poetry and translation across the arts.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020), winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Award. His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, awarded the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and translator, most recently, of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press 2018), Andrea Marcolongo’s The Ingenious Language (Europa Editions 2019) and Carlo and Renzo Piano’s Atlantis (Europa Editions 2020) He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Fellowship, and other awards. He is a co-curator of Policromia, the Siena Art Institute's annual international festival of poetry and translation across the arts.

Dirceu Villa  (1975, São Paulo, Brazil) is the author of 6 books of poetry, MCMXCVIII (1998), Descort (2003), Icterofagia (2008), Transformador (anthology, 1998-2013), speechless tribes (2018) and couraça (2020). He is also the translator of Joseph Conrad’s short-stories from A Set of Six (2009), Ezra Pound’s Lustra (2011), Mairéad Byrne’s Famosa na sua cabeça (selection and translation, 2015) and Jean Cocteau’s L’Ange Heurtebise (in print). Some of his poems can be found in literary publications abroad such as Rattapallax (USA), Poetry Wales (UK), Alforja (Mexico), Alba (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France), Atelier and Mediumpoesia (Italy), and others. He has written essas on contemporary poetry and a revision of the poetry canon of Portuguese language for Germina Literatura magazine (later expanded into a post-Doctoral study). He also organised na anthology of Brazilian contemporary poets for Mexico City’s La Otra magazine in 2009, and has written prefaces for Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire and Christopher Marlowe’s works in Brazil, as well as prefaces for contemporary authors like Alfredo Fressia and Ricardo Aleixo. He was invited to the 2012 PoesieFestival in Berlin. While working on his translation of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts to Portuguese, he was selected for a Translation Residency organised by the British Council and the Writers’ Centre Norwich, in London and Norwich (2015), and was invited for the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Granada, Nicarágua (2018), joining, also, the Policromia Festival in Siena, Italy (2019). He holds a PhD from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) on the Italian and the British poetry of the XVth and XVIth centuries (with a Doctorate internship in London, researching at the Warburg Institute Library). He taught Literature at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) and presently teaches Literary Translation at Casa Guilherme de Almeida (Centre for the Study of Literary Translation), and writing in literary workshops. He has written against the 2016 coup d’état in Brazil and the far right politics that ensued.