Speakers:
Olivia Kate Cerrone is the author of The Hunger Saint, a historical novella about the child miners of Sicily, which won a 2018 American Fiction Award. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated work has received the Jack Dyer Prize from the Crab Orchard Review, the Mason’s Road Literary Award, and first place in Italian Americana’s annual literary contest. Her writing has appeared in Psychology Today, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, The Huffington Post and elsewhere. She is currently at work on DISPLACED, a contemporary novel set in Boston about the fateful intersection of two families, one seeking asylum in Boston, whose lives are forever transformed by immigration politics and devastating betrayal.
Kathy Curto is the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (Bordighera Press). Her work has been featured several times on NPR, in the essay collection, Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now, and in The New York Times, Barrelhouse, La Voce di New York, Drift, Talking Writing, Junk, The Inquisitive Eater, The Asbury Park Press, VIA-Voices in Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo and Lumina. She teaches at The Writing Institute and Montclair State University and has been the recipient of the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship and the Montclair State University Engaged Teaching Fellowship. She serves on the faculty of the Joe Papaleo Writers’ Workshop in Cetara, Italy. Curto lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their four children.
Maria Giura has taught Literature and Writing at St. John’s University, Montclair State University, and Binghamton University where she received her PhD in English. Giura’s writing has appeared in several literary journals including Prime Number, Presence, Italian Americana, Voices in Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo, Tiferet, and Lips. She has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Center for Women Writers and is a judge for the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize. Her first book What My Father Taught Me (Bordighera Press, 2018), a finalist for the Paterson Book Prize, is a collection of memory poems about growing up Italian- American from her earliest days as the daughter of immigrant parents. Her second book, Celibate: A Memoir, published October 2019 by Apprentice House Press, is about her struggle to hang onto her faith in the midst of trying to understand—and untangle herself from—her complex relationship with a Catholic priest.
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.
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.
