Guido Mazzoni (1967) studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He was a scholarship holder at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1994–1995), Lecturer at University College London (1995–96), Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago (2003–04), Italian Affiliated Fellow for the Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2007), Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2010), the University of Chicago (2011), the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2016), and the University of California, Berkeley (2016), Fellow of the Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York (2018), visiting professor at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples (2023, 2025), and Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto (2025). Since 2017 he has taught creative writing at the Molly Bloom School in Rome and in the Master’s Program in Creative Writing at IULM University in Milan.
He is the author of the poetry books La scomparsa del respiro dopo la caduta (in Poesia contemporanea. Terzo quaderno italiano, edited by F. Buffoni, Guerini, 1992), I mondi (Donzelli, 2010; Premio Selezione Ceppo, Premio Tirinnanzi), and La pura superficie (Donzelli, 2017; Premio Pagliarani, Premio Napoli); of works of literary theory and criticism, including Forma e solitudine (Marcos y Marcos, 2002), Sulla poesia moderna (Il Mulino, 2005; French edition Sur la poésie moderne, Garnier Classiques, 2014; Russian edition O sovremennoj poezii, NLO, 2024), Teoria del romanzo (Il Mulino, 2011; English edition Theory of the Novel, Harvard University Press, 2017), and On Modern Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2022; recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature); and two books on contemporary politics and society, I destini generali (Laterza, 2015) and Senza riparo. Sei tentativi di leggere il presente (Laterza, 2025). He served on the editorial board of the journal Allegoria (2007–2015), was among the founders of the website Le parole e le cose, which he directed from 2011 to 2018, and has contributed to La Repubblica and Il manifesto.