Cristina Perissinotto is Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies at the University of Ottawa, where she also directs the Italian Language Program. She studied philosophy at the University of Venice in Italy; she then received an MA in Medieval History and a PhD in Italian literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a thesis on Renaissance Utopia. Her intellectual interests are on the relation between the literary word and philosophy. She has published a book on the Mediterranean entitled Mediterranoesis. She has completed a monograph on Italian political theatre and has published widely on Renaissance and contemporary literature. She has also published about 50 poems in North American journals, including «Poetry East» and «The Antigonish Review». In 2010 she published two poetry collections: Exhale, Exhale, (Guernica, Toronto, 2010) and e Taprobana Tea (Campanotto: Udine, 2010). She has a weekly column in the “Corriere Canadese” where she muses about poetry and philosophy. Her writing has taken her to many different places. She has been writer in residence at the Writer’s Center in the island of Paros, Greece and at the Center for Writers and Translators in Rhodes, Greece. In 2011 she will be writer-in-residence for part of the month of July in the Viking Island of Gottland, off the coast of Sweden.
