Nassim W. Balestrini is professor of American Studies and Intermediality, and Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG), Austria. Her publications and research interests include American literature and culture (predominantly of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries) as well as adaptation and intermedial relations (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011). Currently, she is working on hip-hop artists’ life writing across media, American theatre history, contemporary American drama and opera, and the poet laureate traditions in the United States and in Canada.