The Poetry of Phoebe Giannisi

Phoebe Giannisi (Athens, 1964) is amongst Greece’s foremost contemporary poets. She is the author of eight books of poetry, three of which, Homerica (2017), Chimera (2019), and Cicada (2022), have now been translated into English by poet-translator Brian Sneeden. Her award-winning work focuses on the field of ecopoetics, on the polyphony of voices attached to place, and the ethnography of the animated subjects that inhabit it. Bodies, weather, earth, seeds, orality, writing, love, female condition, mythic personas, sound, multiplicity, language, and animal beings constitute the primary subjects for Giannisi’s poetic activity. Her selected solo exhibitions include: TETTIX, EMST (Athens, 2012) and AIGAI_O, Angeliki Chatzimichali Museum (with Iris Lycourioti, 2015). In 2016, she gave the performance lecture “Nomos, The Land Song” at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York. Phoebe Giannisi also collaborates with Zissis Kotionis on projects in the field of ecopoetics, including: “The Ark. Old Seeds for New Cultures” (12th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2010); “Nothing to Do with Dionysos – Dionysus Tub” (Akademia Platonos, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2011), “Kernos. A Plate for All” (“Householding,” Bauhaus, Dessau, 2015), and “Nature / Culture Calling” (Nordbanhof, Museum of Architecture, Vienna Biennale, 2017). She was a Humanities Fellow at Columbia University (2016), and Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2023 at San Francisco State University. Giannisi is also an architect and Professor of Architecture and Cultural Studies at the University of Thessaly.

Brian Sneeden is a poet, literary translator, and editor. His collection of poems, Last City, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2018. His poetry has received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize, and has appeared in Harvard Review Online, Poetry Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. His translations have received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and other recognitions. His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017, and his translation of Giannisi’s collection Cicada was published by New Directions in 2022. He is a co-founding editor of World Poetry Books, where he served as team lead on books which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/de Palchi Book Award. 

Laura Jansen is Associate Professor (Reader) of Classics & Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (2018 CUP), editor of The Roman Paratext (2014 CUP), Anne Carson/ Antiquity (Bloomsbury 2022), Anne Carson’s Euripides (Classical Antiquity 2023: 42.2), and Susan Sontag’s Tangential Classics (OUP 2024), and general editor of the seriesClassical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury). Her research explores the interplay of classical memory and modern identity in 20th and 21st century experimental artists and their dialogue with archaic and classical Greek literature and thought. Laura regularly runs international events and collaborates with emerging voices in the fields of poetry and the visual arts. Her research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. She was Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), Harvard, in 2022-23, and currently represents the CHS as Judge for the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets 2023. She is originally from Buenos Aires.