Pasquale Verdicchio, is Emeritus professor in the Department of Literature, at the University of California, San Diego, where from 1986-2021 he taught literature, film, cultural studies and environmental literature. His poetry, essays, translations from the Italian (which include works by Pasolini, Zanzotto, Caproni, Merini, Lamarque and Atzeni), and photography have appeared through Guernica Editions and other publishers. His poetry collection This Nothing’s Place was awarded the Bressani Prize in 2010.  His most recent publications include Only You (poetry, Ekstasis, 2021), Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, co-edited with Loredana Di Martino (Cambridge, 2017), and Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild (Lexington, 2016). In 2015, he was awarded a Muir Environmental Fellowship by Muir College, UCSD. Most recently, he was director of the University of California Study Center in Bologna, from 2017-2020.

Loredana Di Martino is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of San Diego. Her current research focuses on the intersections between Italian literature, gender studies, and postcolonial and transnational studies. Her most recent work has been published in gender/sexuality/Italy and is forthcoming with California Italian Studies. Previously, she has worked on modernism and postmodernism, as well as on contemporary crime and hybrid fiction dealing with migrations, youth violence, fatherhood, and cultural traumas. Her publications on these topics include peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries in addition to the co-edited volume (with Pasquale Verdicchio) Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema (2017) and the single-authored manuscript Il caleidoscopio della scrittura, James Joyce, Carlo Emilio Gadda e il romanzo modernista (2009).