Gayle is American, born in 1957, and holds a B.A. in English (Phi Beta Kappa) from Oberlin College. After working two years as a reporter in the Cleveland, Ohio area, she moved to Italy in 1981. She presently lives in Milan with her Italian husband and two children, and teaches translation techniques at the Università di Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli. She has worked as a translator for such Italian publishers as Fabbri and Adelphi, and her translations of contemporary Italian poetry have appeared over the years in Spazio Umano/Human Space (Milan), Verse (College of William and Mary /University of Saint Andrews), and Modern Poetry in Translation (King's College London). She translated and co-edited (together with Gian Paolo Renello) the bilingual anthology, ITALIAN POETRY 1950-1990 (Branden/Dante University Press, Boston, 1996), for which she received the National Translation Prize from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 1997. The anthology also generated a lecture, and later an article, on The Problem of Density in the Translation of Contemporary Italian Poetry (Il Confronto Letterario, University of Pavia, 2002). In 2001 she received a grant from the Raiziss-DePalchi Foundation (Academy of American Poets) in New York to complete her translation of prose poems (I trucioli) by Camillo Sbarbaro. She has also published short stories of her own and completed three novels. Her children's book, Una stella in fondo al mare (A Star at the Bottom of the Sea), which builds on a story that her daughter Olivia, then age 6, made up one day at the seaside near Pesaro, was published in September 2001 by Edizioni ARKA in Milan, and has also been published in Greece, Taiwan, South Korea and the U.S.A.
