Patricio Ferrari
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. He holds degrees from the Sorbonne (MAS), Brown University (MFA), and the University of Lisbon (PhD). As translator and editor, he has published more than 20 books, including the complete works of Fernando Pessoa’s three heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—(with Margaret Jull Costa), and The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (with Forrest Gander), both from New Directions. His other book-length translations include works by António Osório (Portuguese), Frank Stanford, and Martin Corless-Smith (English).
In 2025, Ferrari received the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of his Elsehere trilogy—an exploration of migration, identity, and the vernacular soundscapes of Buenos Aires. He coined the term “poetic heterophony” to describe poetry shaped by multiple linguistic systems, each revealing a distinct self or enacting a process of self-othering through an adopted language.
Based in New York City since 2017, Ferrari teaches at Rutgers University–Newark and in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also the host of “World Poetry Salon,” a collaboration between Limelight Poetry (founded by Wang Yin) and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch of the New York Public Library.
Ferrari has been awarded residencies from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Shanghai Writers Association, and the T.S. Eliot Foundation. He is currently at work on Skeins, Book II of the Elsehere trilogy, and Solunar, a collection of poems written in English and inflected by Mandarin. These projects continue his inquiry into poetic heterophony and the ways expression unfolds through the displacement and resonance among languages.