Alessandro Carrera

was born in Lodi, Italy, in 1954. In the 1970s and ’80s he worked in Milan as a music critic, songwriter, and editor of scientific journals. In 1987 he came to the United States and is currently Professor of Italian and World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has published many volumes of poetry, fiction, and criticism in both Italian and English, and has also translated three novels by Graham Greene and three volumes of the writings of Bob Dylan (song lyrics, poems, and memoirs) into Italian. He has won the Montale Prize for poetry (1993), the Loria Prize for fiction (1998), and the Bertolucci Prize for literary criticism (2006).