In the first session of the series, moderated by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Maria Luce Cacciaguerra and Carmen Gallo, a poet and translator, will use the participants’ texts as a starting point for a collective reflection on the practice of poetry and the processes involved in the act of writing.
Carmen Gallo lives in Naples and teaches English literature at Sapienza University. She has translated works by Shakespeare, Eliot, Caryl Churchill, and Hannah Sullivan. In 2025, she published *Stanze per una fuga* (La Vita Felice, Città d’Acqui Terme Prize), which includes *Le fuggitive* (Aragno), for which she won the Naples Prize for Poetry in 2021.
She contributes to the blog Le Parole e Le cose, the magazine il verri, and co-edits Polisemie. Rivista di poesia iper-contemporanea. Her latest book of poetry is Procne Machine (Einaudi 2026).

Maria Luce Cacciaguerra (Palermo, 1997) began her research in the field of concrete poetry. In 2022, she founded the Murmur collective and serves as editor of the Remedia series for Pungitopo. She recently edited the publication Almanacco Murmur (Paint It Black). Winner of the Meridiana Prize, sponsored by the Madre Museum, she is currently exhibiting the project Santa du pao oco. She was selected for Dial-A-Poem Italy, in collaboration with the John Giorno Poetry System.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (Middletown, Connecticut, USA), a poet and translator, is the author of The History of Breathing (2025), OnEndings (2019), and Body to Mineral (2016). She has recently presented poetry performances, installations, and collective actions at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, Luci d’Artista in Turin, MACTE in Termoli, the Madre Museum in Naples, Kunsthalle Bern, Sonnenstube in Lugano, ShortTheatre in Rome, and Prosopopoeia in Vienna. She is the recipient of the Italian Council’s Talent Development Award and the Gallarate Prize. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the European Graduate School.

Murmur is a contemporary poetry collective founded in Milan in the winter of 2022 with the aim of revitalizing the art of poetry through encounter. The collective was founded by Maria Luce Cacciaguerra and Greta Sugar, and is curated and led by Maria Luce Cacciaguerra and Allison Grimaldi Donahue. We organize poetry readings and workshops.