Notes on Contributors

Rosemary Serra, PhD, is an associate professor in general sociology at the University of Trieste in Italy. Her research interests include elderly population, gender, minors and adolescents, volunteering action, community development, family, and addictions. In the last few years, she has studied different aspects of Italian American history and culture, particularly the identity changes of generations of Italian Americans. Publications on the subject of Italian Americans include Sense of Origins. A Study of New York's Young Italian Americans (2020); “Percorsi di un italiano all'estero: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra,” in Italian American Review (2023); and “New York City: A Myth between Past and Present,” in Perception of the Self and Sense of Nature. A Research between Italy and Argentina (2020).David Masello writes about art and culture. He is a widely published essayist and poet, and many of his one-act plays and monologues, which he often performs, have been produced by theatre companies in New York and Los Angeles. He is executive editor of MILIEU, a national print magazine about design and architecture. He is also a governor of New York's National Arts Club.Michael J. Cariello passed in March 2023 at the age of 93. He was the last and youngest of the Cariello brothers and sisters, children of immigrants Pasquale and Serafina. Drafted during the Korean War and sent to Germany as part of the occupation army, Cariello took advantage of the GI Bill and went to college. He worked as a public-school teacher, teaching history and English for 30 years. He retired to Vermont and published his first story at age 89. He wrote stories about his own life (“Why I Did Not Become a Printer” is one of them) and about his parent's journey from Italy to America.Barbara Worton is the author of Bedtime Stories: The Short, Long and Tall Tales of a Sleepwriter, Too Tall Alice, and “London Calling.” She coauthored If I'm Talking, Why Aren't You Listening? and The Adventures of The Baker's Daughter. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and women's service and business publications, including: “The Fabric of Life” in the Fall 2023 issue of Ovunque Siamo and “Sunday Sauce” and “Pre-Wedding Nerves” in Paterson Literary Review's Spring 2024 issue. She writes songs as a member of Laverne + Ralph and appeared in and worked on Surviving on LES, an award-winning independent film.Featured Poet Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was educated at Harvard and Cambridge. She is professor emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her nine collections of poetry, all published by Knopf, include most recently The Surveyors (2017) and Zoom Rooms (2022). Coeditor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter is also editor of The Best American Poetry 2024. She lives in Baltimore.Lenore Balliro lives in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where she writes, makes art, and walks dogs. Her paternal grandparents come from Catania and Caltanissetta provinces in Sicily. She has been published in several literary journals and anthologies, including a past edition of Italian Americana, and she is a former recipient of the Alms House Press chapbook award and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts award for poetry.Paola Bruni began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Pushcart nominated, her work has been published in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize. Paola's debut book is an epistolary collection titled, “how do you spell the sound of crickets” (Paper Angel Press, August 2022).Stephen Campiglio directed for 12 years the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series at Manchester Community College in Connecticut and more recently coedited Noh Place Poetry Anthology (Lost Valley Press, 2022). His poems and Italian translations have appeared in many journals, and his current project, with Elena Borelli, will render the first complete translation of Giovanni Pascoli's volume of poetry Canti di Castelvecchio.Barbara Crooker is author of 10 full-length books of poetry, with Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books) published in 2024. Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, was longlisted for the Julie Suk award. The Book of Kells won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 award from Poetry by the Sea.Jennifer Martelli, a third-generation Italian American, is the author of The Queen of Queens, winner of the 2023 Italian American Studies Association Book Award, and My Tarantella, named a “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. Her website is www.jennmartelli.com.Francesca Moroney (she/her) is an Italian American and Irish American mother, reader, writer, and teacher of creative writing at The Writers Studio. Her poems, book reviews, and essays can be found in Rattle, The Los Angeles Review, Cagibi, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine, as well as other online literary magazines.Carla Panciera's latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023). She has published two poetry collections: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her short story collection, Bewildered, received Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts. A retired high school English teacher, Carla lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.R. A. Pavoldi is a self-trained poet. His paternal grandparents and maternal great grandparents emigrated from Alife and Caiazzo, 10 miles apart north of Naples. He credits the Napolitano American dialect and school of hard knocks for his voices. He's published in The Hudson Review, North American Review, FIELD, Crab Orchard Review, Hanging Loose, Margie, Tar River Poetry, Slipstream, I-70 Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.Workshop leader, tutor, and mom, with roots in spoken word, Kathryn Petruccelli holds an MA in teaching English language learners. Her work has appeared in places like The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, and Tinderbox. She's worked with poets-in-the-schools programs on two coasts. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland. Her website is poetroar.com.JoAnna Scandiffio is a gemologist living in San Francisco. She likens her poems to “bird nests, made with fragments randomly connected to hold the moment” and says she is “like the old medieval monks who copied out verses in colored inks so the world could sing forever.” Her work has appeared in Calyx, The Poeming Pigeon, Poets 11, Sugared Water, The MacGuffin, Italian Americana, and other journals.Maryfrances Wagner's newest books are The Immigrants’ New Camera and Solving for X. Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award. She coedits I-70 Review, is president of The Writers Place, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and was Missouri Poet Laureate 2021–2023. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Laurel Review, Poetry East, Green Mountains Review, Main Street Rag, Rattle, and River Styx.Joseph Zaccardi's sixth book of poems, Songbird of the Nine Rivers, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2023. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Rattle, and elsewhere. Zaccardi served as the poet laureate of Marin County, California, from 2013 to 2015, and edited Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies and Bystanders Project.Michael Palma's books include the poetry collections A Fortune in Gold, Begin in Gladness, and Local Colors; 20 volumes of translations from modern Italian poets; a fully rhymed Inferno; and Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry. His translation of the complete Commedia was published in December 2024. He has received the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, Raiziss/de Palchi Book Award, Italo Calvino Award, Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, and Premio Speciale of the Associazione Culturale Campana of Latina, Italy. His essay “The Road to Rome, and Back Again” appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXVII.