Franca Mancinelli

Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. She is widely considered to be one of the most compelling new poetic voices in Italian poetry. Her poems and prose poems have been translated into English by John Taylor and published at The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour's Sleep from Here (2019), as well as a volume gathering her prose narratives and personal essays, The Butterfly Cemetery (2022). Her most recent collection, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (2020), was published in Taylor’s translation in 2023 at Black Square Editions (New York). With this translation, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, nearly all of Mancinelli’s writing to date has become available in English. Mancinelli has been selected for the ongoing European poetry project “Versopolis,” was the Chair Poet in Residence (Calcutta, India) in January–February 2019, and participated in the European program “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes” in 2018. In 2022, her texts were selected for “Artist For Plants” (The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway). Her work has been translated into fifteen languages.