Arlene Tribbia is a Chicago artist/poet who works across disciplines experimenting and composing in many variations of a theme. Her art is layered with the metaphorical qualities of poetry and language often plays a role in her imagery.

Currently, she has just completed work on an illuminated poetry installation and is transforming her novel, The Ten Thousand Loves into a suite of poems-as-paintings.

As a prolific artist and poet, her daily practice is about shapeshifting an idea, a notion, an image or other existing work from one medium, one form to another, exploring its secret boundaries and possibilities.

How many incarnations does a word, a narrative, a color, a line have?

Her colors and lines have grown into sketches, paintings, etchings, ceramics, mosaics, poems, poems-as-paintings, novel-sculptures and illuminated poetry installations.

Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate, selected one of her poems for his Poetry 180 website: A Poem A Day for American High Schools. She was also a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Award and Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award.

Two of her short stories were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Many of her short stories, essays and poems have appeared in literary journals in the United States and Canada, as well as online. For a number of years she wrote for the Chicago Tribune.