Speakers:
Mary Cappello is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour; Swallow, and Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack. Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration, co-authored with James Morrison and Jean Walton, was published in 2018. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, on NPR, and Best American Essays. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, a recipient of The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), and Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.
Poet, translator, and editor Peter Covino is associate professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, and author of the poetry collections, The Right Place to Jump (2012); and Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005) both from W. Michigan University Press. His prizes include a 2019 NEA Translation Fellowship and the PEN American / Osterweil Award. He is one of the founding editors of Barrow Street Press Inc., and Poetry Editor of VIA.
Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, and coeditor of several anthologies, including The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora, and Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo. She has recently completed a book-length memoir, “No Confetti for the Dead” and is working on a coedited anthology on the Triangle fire. She is Professor of English at New Jersey City University.
Julia Lisella’s poetry books include Always (2014), Terrain (2007), and Love Song Hiroshima (2004). Her poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ocean State Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Exit 7, Salamander, Voices In Italian Americana and many others. She is also a scholar of women’s writing and recently co-edited a collection of essays, Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement. She is professor of English at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston at I Am Books in Boston’s North end.
Sangamithra Iyer is an engineer and writer who received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, where she studied memoir with Louise DeSalvo. Sangu was a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize in New Environmental Writing and an Emerging Writing Fellow at Aspen Summer Words. Her writing has been published by The Kenyon Review, Satya Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, n+1, Hippocampus Magazine, and Newtown Literary where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
IDEA Boston is an Italian-inspired festival celebrating authors, books and culture, and organized by independent bookstore I AM Books, situated in Boston's North End neighborhood.
