Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana

About the Authors

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Domenico Adamo (1888–1964) descended from a family of dialectical poets. He left his birthplace , San Mango d’Aquino, in Catanzaro province, for a six-year apprenticeship in Naples, returning in 1908. He set up shop and married, but left his family in 1912 to seek prosperity in the United States. In 1923, a year after the fascists took power in Italy, he returned to Italy for his family. However, his antifascist writings had put him in disfavor with the authorities, and early in 1924 he fled to America, an exile. The poet Riccardo Cordiferro says of Adamo: ‘‘He was born a poet; consequently he writes without any pretense of creating art. But how many beautiful poems he writes and how much ardent passion he imbues in the verses that spring from his heart!’’ Joseph D. Adamo (Adams) is the translator of his father’s work. He is an author himself, as well as an editor and literary scholar who now dedicates himself to oil painting at his studio and gallery in Painter, Virginia. John Addiego is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry has been published in Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, and Ohio Review, as well as numerous other small journals. Kim Addonizio’s paternal grandparents, as far as she can ascertain, emigrated from the province of Avellino around the beginning of the twentieth century. Addonizio is the author of four poetry collections, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton). Her other books include two novels from Simon and Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. Her work has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. She is online at www.kimaddonizio.com. Carol Bonomo Albright has been editor-in-chief of Italian Americana for almost twenty years. Recently under the direction of Christine Palamidessi Moore, she initiated a website supplement to the journal. It can be found at www.Italianamericana.com. She is active in literary and historical associations and was a two-term vice president of the American Italian Historical Association. She teaches Italian-American Studies at Harvard University Extension School and has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. In 2004 she coedited an annotated 317 318 about the authors edition of two of Joseph Rocchietti’s works, written in 1835 and l845 (making one of them the first Italian-American novel). She coedited an anthology, Italian Immigrants Go West, and was series editor of Italian American Autobiographies. ‘‘Washington Square,’’ a section of her memoir , was published in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion. She wrote essays for the landmark publication The Dream Book: Writings by Italian American Women, for Voices of the Daughters, and for Social Pluralism and Literary History. She has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American Ethnic History, PMLA, LIT, and MELUS. She has received numerous grants and awards, including being named an associate fellow of the Danforth Foundation of Higher Education and receiving a university-to-community outreach grant from that foundation. Tony Ardizzone is the author of seven books of fiction, including the novel In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, from which ‘‘Lamb Soup’’ is excerpted. His work has received the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. He is the Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University , Bloomington. His father’s parents came to the United States from the town of Menfi in the Sicilian province of Agrigento. J. T. Barbarese is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Black Beach, and a translation of Euripides’ The Children of Heracles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). His published poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, and Poetry and have been anthologized in The Italian-American Reader (Morrow, 2003) and The Poetry Daily Anthology. He has published short fiction in Story Quarterly and the North American Review and essays and literary journalism in Tri-Quarterly, Sewanee Review, and The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993). He is a second-generation Italian American whose paternal grandparents were both from Nereto in Abruzzi and whose maternal grandparents were Neapolitan and Piedmontese. Dennis Barone is the author of twelve books, including God’s Whisper (a novella from Spuyten Duyvil, 2005) and North Arrow (stories from Quale Press, 2007). Recently...