FRAGMENT SCIENCE 
Paul Vangelisti & William Xerra

Gianluca Muratori was born in 1964 in Formigine, near Modena, Italy. He began his career as a photographer in 1983, and since 1990 his photographs have been shown in personal and group shows in Bologna, Modena, Rimini, Paris and Rome. As a fashion and commercial photographer he has worked for Nike, Mandarin Duck, Armani, Stone Island, Maria Grazia Severi, Messori and Casucci, among others, as well as publishing his photos in various Italian and international magazines such as Vogue, Men’s Health, Style, Corriere della Sera, Moda and Esquire. He lives and works in Modena.

Born in Milan in 1934, Giulia Niccolai is the daughter of an Italian father and an American mother, and grew up in both Italy and the United States. During the 1950s, she began working as a photojournalist for various Italian, European and American publications, including Life, Paris Match and Der Spiegel. In the late 1960s, she quit professional photography to focus on writing. She was a member of the neo-avant-garde group of writers, Gruppo 63, and published her novel Il grande angolo [“Wide Angle”] in 1966. She produced her first book of poetry Humpty Dumpty, written in English, in 1969. In 1970, with Adriano Spatola, she founded the internationally known poetry journal, Tam Tam. 

Paul Vangelisti has published more than thirty books of poetry and is a noted translator from Italian. In 2015 he edited Amiri Baraka’s S.O.S.: Poems 1961-2013, for Grove Atlantic, and later this year a bilingual edition of his poems, Imperfect Music, will be forthcoming from Edizioni Galleria Mazzoli in Modena (Italy). In 2006, Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the PEN-USA Award for Translation; while his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 received the Academy of American Poets translation prize in 2010. Vangelisti lives and works in Los Angeles.