Valentina Colonna is an Italian poet, pianist-composer, and researcher. Born in Turin into a family of musicians, she has lived in Granada, Spain, since 2023, where she is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Granada.
Among her poetry books are La cadenza sospesa (Aragno, 2015, with a foreword by Davide Rondoni), published in Argentina in 2020 (La cadencia suspendida, Buenos Aires Poetry, translated by Mario Chávez Carmona); Stanze di città e altri viaggi (Aragno, 2019, with a foreword by Aleš Šteger), shortlisted for the Frascati Poetry Prize (60th edition); and L’albero bianco (pulcinoelefante, 2023), a limited-edition chapbook created in collaboration with photographer Daniele Ferroni.
A special monographic issue of Secolo Donna. Almanacco della poesia italiana 2021 (Valentina Colonna: “parlami ancora come fosse mia la voce”) (Macabor), edited by Bonifacio Vincenzi, was dedicated to her poetry, featuring 10 contributions from contemporary poets.
Since 2016, she has been part of Versopolis – where poetry lives, a European platform for emerging poetry supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. Her works have been translated and published in 19 countries, earning her recognition in prestigious international poetry journals (including Manuskripte, Ostra-gehege, Poetikon, Italian Journal of Translation, Zenda, Círculo de Poesía de México, Nuovi Argomenti, and L’Immaginazione) and invitations to major international poetry festivals in 11 countries (such as Dnevi Pozije In Vina – Slovenia; Literatur & Wein – Austria; Hausacher LeseLenz – Germany; Druskininskai Poetic Fall – Lithuania; Cosmopoética and Barcelona Poesía – Spain; Yerevan BookFest – Armenia).
Her work has been reviewed in the national press and she has been a guest on radio and television programs. Media outlets that have covered her poetry include Corriere della Sera (La Lettura), La Stampa, Avvenire, Radio Rai3 (Fahrenheit), Rai Italia, RTV San Marino, and RSLO (Slovenia).
As a pianist, she graduated in 2011 under Luciana Bigazzi and honed her piano interpretation skills with Ramin Bahrami and Paul Badura-Skoda. She specialized in Baroque repertoire, studying harpsichord with Béatrice Martin and Luca Guglielmi at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona, Spain, where she also earned a Master’s degree in Early Music Interpretation in collaboration with Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Now focused on her own piano compositions intertwined with poetry, she has released three piano singles (NCM/EGEA/Machiavelli) and her first album for piano and poetry, PIANOPOETRY. Resonances (NCM/Egea/Machiavelli, 2023).
She holds a PhD (Doctor Europaeus, 2021) in Digital Humanities (Linguistics) from the University of Genoa, where she produced the first comprehensive history of poetry reading from the 1960s to today. In 2017, she conceived and launched the Voices of Italian Poets (VIP) project at the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory of the University of Turin, focusing on the phonetic analysis and preservation of Italian poetry readings, which she continues to direct.
Since 2023, she has been a MSCA-Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Granada, where she serves as the Principal Investigator of the project Voices of Spanish Poets: Vocal Archive and Experimental Study on Poetry Reading (VSP).
As a translator, she curated the first Italian anthology of Spanish poet Ángeles Mora, Casa dell’acqua, published by Animamundi in the Cantus Firmus collection (directed by Franca Mancinelli and Rossana Abbis), with an afterword by Matteo Lefèvre. The translation was supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), earning her a mention at the Geiger Prize by the Cini Foundation in 2024 (Venice) and the LILEC “Francesca Falchieri” Prize for Poetry Translation in 2024 (University of Bologna).
She has also collaborated on the music programs of Vatican Radio, for which she wrote and hosted six episodes on Musica poetica: la retorica del Barocco as part of the program L’arpeggio, and she conceived the show Le parole della musica.
