Guido Mazzoni (Florence, 1967) is a poet and essayist. As a poet, he is the author of La scomparsa del respiro dopo la caduta (in Terzo quaderno italiano, ed. by Franco Buffoni, Guerini 1992), I mondi (Donzelli 2010) and La pura superficie (Donzelli 2017, Pagliarani Prize 2018, Napoli Prize 2018). He also published three books of literary theory – Forma e solitudine (Marcos y Marcos, 2002), Sulla poesia moderna (Il Mulino, 2005), Teoria del romanzo (Il Mulino, 2011, English translation Theory of the Novel, Harvard University Press 2017) – and a book on contemporary politics and society, I destini generali (Laterza 2015). Some of his poems are translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, Slovenian and Spanish. A French anthology of his poetry has recently been published (Grammaire. Choix de poèmes 1997-2017, Alidades 2019).
Mazzoni teaches Literary Theory at the University of Siena. He has been visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, the University of Chicago, the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and the University of California Berkeley. He has also been Italian Fellow for the Arts at the American Academy, Rome, Fellow at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York, and professor of creative writing at the Scuola Molly Bloom, Rome, and at IULM, Milan. He lives in Rome.