Sara Fruner
Sara Fruner was born in Riva del Garda, Trentino, North-Eastern Italy. After graduating in English literature and language at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice), and specializing in literary translation from the English at Istituto Superiore Interpreti e Traduttori, Fondazione Scuole Civiche Milano, and at Ca’ Foscari, she has been working as a translator in the publishing industry, mainly for Giunti Editore. Being interested in post-colonial literature, her translations include such authors as Dionne Brand, Monique Truong, Sello Duiker, Raj Rao and Don McKay.
After serving at the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles in 2007, she has worked for six years as Senior Publication Coordinator in an international research center based in Trento, and taught English as a foreign language at Istituto Accademico Interpreti e Traduttori di Trento (ISIT), and at the University of Trento.
In 2016, she moved to New York City, where she currently teaches Italian at New York University and Fashion Institute of Technology, with additional past experience at Mercy College and Columbus Citizens Foundation. She contributes to bilingual newsmagazine La Voce di New York and happens to collaborate as interpreter/performer for the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), Magazzino Italian Art and Hauser&Wirth Gallery.
Her articles have appeared in Brick Literary Journal, Magazzino 23, CinematoGraphie.
Sara’s Italian poetry has been published on Graphie and on Italian Poetry, the most recognized portal of Italian poetry to date, where she is included among the featured poets who belong to the second half of the 20th Century.
She is a Professional Member of PEN America Women.
"Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills," her first collection of poems in English, came out in 2018 by Bordighera Press NY.
"Lucciole in palmo alla notte", a collection of poems in Italian, has come out in June 2019 by Supernova Editore, Venice.
She also writes fiction. Her first novel, "L'istante largo", has come out in June 2020 for Bollati & Boringhieri and has received such great acclaim to score two printings in two weeks.
As a bilingual poet, fully aware that poetry is one with the music and architecture of any given language, she writes in Italian what she wants to write in Italian, and in English what she wants to write in English. As such, she bypasses translation, an art she deeply loves, but whose toll, especially in poetry, can be extremely high.
The place between English and Italian is what she calls “home.” Swinging there, while writing poetry, her favorite activity.
Sara has been accepted in numerous residency programs for writers worldwide, including BILTC at the Banff Center for the Arts (2004), Noepe Center for Literary Arts on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (2014), Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre (CAMAC) as Ténot Bursary, Marnay-Sur-Seine, France (2015), Mountain Seas, Flinders Island, Tasmania (2015), Earthskin Creative Residency, Muriwai, New Zealand (2016), Galerie Huit, Arles, France (2016), The Writer’s Room at the Betsy, Miami, Florida (2018), Hanna Creative Center, Castellvì de la Marca, Spain (2018), Casa Tagumerche, La Gomera, Canary Islands (2018), New Orleans Writers’ Residency (2019), The Studios of Key West, Florida, (2019), The Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia (December 2019- January 2020).
She is currently writer-in-residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, where she is hosted through August 30, 2020.
READINGS
In April 2019, Sara was invited to read her poetry at John D. Calandra Italian American Institute to celebrate National Poetry Month 2019, and has been in conversation with poet Madeline Millan within the series "Women in PEN" at the Fashion Institute of Technology on April 23.
On September 14, she read for the Italian-American Writers Association, NY Mulberry Street Library, 10 Jersey Street.
On October, Thursday 24, she read her poetry at Fordham University, 113 W 60th St.
Works
"Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills"
In November 2016, I moved to Sugar Hill, Harlem, after a decade of longing for New York City —my geographical soulmate. Provided with a cityscape that somehow welcomed, with all its contradictions, the poetic self, I started cruising the streets, searching people’s eyes, listening to the endless epics the city narrates every day, every night. New York is a storyteller nobody can silence. My recording of its voice comes from a pure act of love towards the extraordinary repository of diverse humanity the city proves to be. Beauty here can sparkle with horror, disgust and trauma, and still be utterly gracious.
This contrast, in its fierce vividness, has opened up a new territory that my imagination never gets tired of exploring. I also began questioning the political moment in which I landed here, with the world stepping into some new global Middle Ages, and faltering on major long-standing issues —including discrimination, violence on women, race disparities— and on history itself. If my poetry in Italian primarily focuses on an intimate pursuit, where the universal might resonate in the poetic subject’s individual experience, "Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills" addresses the current world we are living.
My poetic imagery moves around archetypal recurring images, which could suggest some poietic consistency, but which I am more prone to define deep-rooted obsessions: pain, wonder, desire, solitude, mourning, loss, god, the quest for beauty in an ethically and environmentally lacerated world.
And love, of course.
"L'istante largo", novel, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin
Lucciole in palmo alla notte
Awards and Recognition
- "When a poet writes in English as a second language, we get a more precise understanding of words. This is a terrific portrait, paying tribute to Manhattan, and Fruner nails the city with clear, fresh perceptions that work like silk on the page. She owns her words with personality and originality in this high-caliber collection." — Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri on "Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills," published in the Washington Independent Review of Books, May 2019.
- "Written in dynamic, intimate clipped prose, 'L'istante largo' takes the reader into a buoyant youthful world where insights and discovery work the kind of brilliance we haven't witnessed in today's prose. Fruner is a magician of the word." - André Aciman, author of "Call Me By Your Name" and "Find Me"
Website
Location
New York City, NY
Author Contact
Category
Fiction & Literature, Poetry
agent Contact
Marco Vigevani - TILA - The Italian Literary Agency