John D. Calandra Italian American Institute: Academic & Cultural Programs

2007-2008

Writers Read Series

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Fred Misurella reads from Lies to Live By.

Fred Misurella’s Lies to Live By (Bordighera, 2005) dissects contemporary America by focusing on Italian Americans from various walks of life, especially as they relate to their families. The seven short stories and novella in this collection include a priest seeking forgiveness for his actor brother, a widowed father sharing his diabetic daughter’s experience of giving birth out of wedlock, a reporter attending the funeral of a friend before traveling to a war zone, and a Vietnam vet recalling coming home for his mother’s funeral after committing a horrific act of war. Together, these stories reveal aspects of Italian-American experiences in the second half of the twentieth century.

“All of Misurella’s finely drawn characters are ‘crossing a bridge, preparing to pass through the doors of a new time zone.’ Their journey from old-world neighborhoods into more modern times makes for delightful reading.”

— Rita Ciresi

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Mary Cappello reads from Awkward: A Detour.

Incomodo. Goffo. Brutto. Spiacevole. Mary Cappello’s immigrant grandfather traced these Italian words in the letters he wrote to her but never sent, words that speak to the misunderstood state of awkwardness. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. In her new book, Awkward: A Detour (Bellevue Literary Press, 2007), Cappello turns her penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition, fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity. She mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Awkward detours to dwell in the incongruity lodged between stutterers and go-betweens, silence and bombast, precociousness and ignorance, Sicilian and Italian.

“At once comforting and startling, Awkward: A Detour is a new kind of memoir, each sentence more of a discovery than a reporting back. The fluent subtlety of Cappello’s adventurous meditation makes memory seem like something worth re-making, and not the casual currency it has become. It is a remarkable achievement.”

—Adam Phillips

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Luigi Fontanella reads from Land of Time: Selected Poems 1972-2003.

“Luigi Fontanella moves between countries as an Italian who has lived in the United States for many years but returns often to his native land. In this collection, he draws on his experience in both countries, and he is also forever moving between past and future, between those people and places of the present and future by whom and in which he will perhaps be best remembered. Fontanella’s poetry is rooted in both a profound critical awareness of the labor of poetry, and a wide embrace of life’s labors – and joys, all of which merge in his “pure azur memory.”

— Rebecca J. West

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Vittoria Repetto reads from Not Just A Personal Ad.

Vittoria Repetto’s precise, compact, and colloquial cadences in the poems of Not Just A Personal Ad (Guernica Editions, 2006) assemble the reality of growing up lesbian in lower Manhattan, loving and losing a mother, hating and reconciling with a father. Running, stumbling, recovering, her lines replicate the struggle between the contradictions of love and desire, work and leisure, pride and passion. No holds barred erotic episodes are unforgettably incised. Without deprecating her innate butchness, Repetto emerges as a transcendently feminine person who has stitched together in these poems an entrancing crazy quilt that unabashedly reveals the here and now of human life, New York style.

“Vittoria Repetto is an energetic and passionate voice in Italian-American poetry. Honest and clear, this brave poet knows how to make the world spin. At the same time, she is able to root her poems in the world of lower Manhattan where she grew up and still lives.”

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Anne Marie Macari reads from Gloryland.

Anne Marie Macari’s breath-taking second collection finds unapologetic revelation in the female body. Gloryland (Alice James Books, 2005) re-examines motherhood, death, birth, and rebirth, drawing on religious and secular creation myths to enact a feminist religion. Bold, rich lyrics reveal the grand in the domestic, claiming the physical as an essential part of the female experience, declaring that to live fully in the body is the truest, bravest and most glorious form of worship.

“Anne Marie Macari’s powerful poems make poetic speech seem an utterly natural act. She is the latest ambassador of a great lineage of strong poets whose subject is blood-knowledge. Sexual without needing to be seductive, spiritual without being sentimental, tough and full-bodied. I like so very much the way the poems are always in hot pursuit of the serious mysteries (kinship, sex, mortality)—at once blind and deeply intelligent, pushing into the underbrush of knowing. Gloryland is a sensational collection.”

— Tony Hoagland

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Emanuel De Pasquale reads from Writing Anew: New and Selected Poems .

Emanuel di Pasquale’s Writing Anew: New and Selected Poems (Bordighera, 2007) spans forty years of his work. Di Pasquale poetry is connected to his Sicilian childhood, the open humanity of the Sicilian family as it reflects not only “local” human emotions, but a humanity that connects and reaches out. The work is alert to the workings of the human heart and its connection to nature. Stylistically, di Pasquale’s work is deeply lyrical and reachable. His poetry celebrates life, the divinity of each living thing: the open eyes of a child, the open wings of a bird, the hurricane in the human tear. For di Pasquale, all is family and deeply alive: fish and fowl, beast and human.

“Emanuel di Pasquale writes with reverence and wonder, like some Adam first laying eyes on beast and tree, bestowing names upon them. In a time when most poets are shedding the dullest gloom, di Pasquale is one in a thousand… All in all, I find di Pasquale an astonishing and delightful poet, a visionary miraculously set down in New Jersey, and a true original.”

— X. J. Kennedy

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Danielle Trussoni reads from Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir.

Growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Danielle Trussoni was fascinated by stories of her dad’s adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Ultimately, she came to believe that when the man she adored drank too much, beat up strangers, or mistreated her mother, it was because the horror of those tunnels still lived inside him. Eventually her mom gave up and left, taking all the kids except Danielle. In Falling Through the Earth (Henry Holt and Co., 2006) the author trails her father through nights at Roscoe’s Vogue Bar, scores of wild girlfriends, and years of bad dreams with a voice that is defiant, funny, and heartbreaking. This vivid and poignant portrait of a father-daughter relationship is filled with anger, stubbornness, outrageous behavior, and battle scars that never completely heal.

“The affection, respect and humor she brings to the task of revealing this complicated individual is testimony both to her creative abilities and to the generosity of her spirit.”

— Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Book Review

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Richard Vetere reads from Machiavelli and Caravaggio.

Pulitzer-nominated playwright Richard Vetere reads from his recently published plays Machiavelli and Caravaggio, which both premiered in 2006. Machiavelli explores the Italian’s personal and political life by using a satirical style similar to Machiavelli’s own dramatic farce The Mandrake. The play poses some questions about life and art: Can there be politics without drama? Drama without sex? Sex without power? Vetere’s drama Caravaggio, which was featured in the Chicago Humanities Festival, tells the story of the great Baroque painter’s troubled life as a fugitive murder and his mysterious death on a Mediterranean beach at Port’Ercole.

“In its best moments, Richard Vetere’s “Caravaggio” recalls the work of Tom Stoppard in its lucid and complex dissection of such issues as religion, realism, art and romanticism. . . . the play is fascinating.”

— Chicago Tribune

Presentations begin at 6 PM.

All events are free.

Building management requires people attending events after business hours to pre-register with the Calandra Institute by calling (212) 642-2094. You will need to show a photo ID to the building’s concierge.