Todd Portnowitz was born in Melbourne, FL and lives and works in New York City. He holds a BA in English from the University of Florida and an MA in Italian Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His prose translations include IN SEARCH OF AMRIT KAUR by Livia Manera Sambuy, THE GREATEST INVENTION by Silvia Ferrara, LONG LIVE LATIN by Nicola Gardini, and ROMAN STORIES by Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as of two young adult novels with the Italian publisher Mondadori. His poetry translations include MIDNIGHT IN SPOLETO by Paolo Valesio, GO TELL IT TO THE EMPEROR: The Selected Poems of Pierluigi Cappello, and METHODS by Lorenzo Carlucci.

He has received honors from the Academy of American Poets (Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, 2015, Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome) and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference. His poetry, essays and poetry translations from and into Italian have appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poesia, Poetry and Southwest Review. An Associate Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, he is also a co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and co-director of the Brooklyn-based reading series for writer-translators, Us&Them.

Books by Todd Portnowitz

Roman Stories

written by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by the author with Todd Portnowitz - Fiction, Short Stories, Women's Fiction

Rome is the protagonist, not the setting, of Jhumpa Lahiri's nine stories. In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering --- until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.