The Poets Company was created in the summer of 2009 on the initiative of Mia Lecomte, Italo-French poet and expert in the literature of migration, under the aegis of ‘La Tenda’, a cultural association for the promotion of multiethnic writing.
The members of the Company are foreign or Italian women poets of foreign extraction, all of whom write at least in part in Italian or are resident in Italy for some of the year.
So far, the Company is made up of about twenty women from different continents, who share a personal history of migration and trans-nationality. They are supported in the production of their performances by artists – painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, dancers and actors – who have wide international experience in a variety of fields.
The Company’s underlying idea is to be a sort of “orchestra” to harmonize the work of all the poets, each with her particular linguistic and cultural tradition, so as to create performances in which the word is supported and amplified by other artistic languages. The structure is “modular”: the basic formula is modified each time to adapt to the occasion of every performance and to the poets on stage. The aim of the Company is to return poetry to the public, restoring it to its original function of shared orality. It also wants to give voice to migrant writing, which in the literary tradition of certain countries is most linked to the oral dimension, and is certainly one of the most innovative and vital products of the hybridization and crossbreeding that mark our century’s cultural history.

Le poete che attualmente compongono la Compagnia sono: Prisca Agustoni, Cristina Ali Farah, Anahid Baklu, Livia Bazu, Laure Cambau, Anilda Ibrahimi, Adriana Langtry, Mia Lecomte, Sarah Zuhra Lukanic, Natalia Molebatsi, Vera Lucia de Oliveira, Helene Paraskeva, Lidia Palazzolo, Brenda Porster, Begonya Pozo, Barbara Pumhösel, Sally Read, Melita Richter, Francisca Paz Rojas, Candelaria Romero, Jacqueline Spaccini, Eva Taylor.

The project has been presented as part of a programme of seminars on Creole literature, conceived of and coordinated by prof. Armando Gnisci of the University La Sapienza in Rome, with the support of the Department for Cultural Policy of the Province of Rome, at Palazzo Valentini and at the University La Sapienza, and is the subject of several degree dissertations by students of the same University.

The Poets’ Company has often been invited to participate in seminars and literary and academic meetings, in Italy and abroad, concerning the poetry of migration written in Italian, with a particular focus on performed expression by women.