Geoffrey Brock was born in Atlanta, grew up in Tallahassee FL, and has lived in Italy, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Gainesville FL, Overland Park KS, Dallas, San Francisco, and Tucson. He earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida, and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford from 2002–2004. Since 2006 he has taught in the Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing & Translation in Fayetteville, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Padma Viswanathan, their two children, and a variable number of animals.

Brock has also received several major awards as a translator, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his 2012 anthology, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in support of his translation of Cesare Pavese’s Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. The latter went on to receive translation prizes from the MLA and the PEN Center USA and was named a “Best Book of 2003” by The Los Angeles Times. His prose translations include Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Roberto Calasso’s K., and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (which received the Lewis Galantière Translation Award from the American Translators Association). He is currently translating the selected poems of Giovanni Pascoli, one of which received the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine.