A lucid view of one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Louise DeSalvo.
Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship.
Personal Effects examines DeSalvo’s memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo’s memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.
Nancy Caronia is a lecturer at University of Rhode Island. She teaches in the Honors Program, Gender & Women’s Studies, and in the departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric. She works on issues of transnationalism and globalization in contemporary American and Anglophone ethnic literature and film. Her scholarly essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including
Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture,
New Delta Review, and
Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her introduction to
Casting Off will appear in Bordighera’s reprint of DeSalvo’s novel.
Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches memoir and other literature and writing courses. She is the author of
Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and
Dire l’indicibile. She is co- editor of
The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (with Louise DeSalvo);
Italian American Writers on New Jersey (with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan);
Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick); and
Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Joseph Sciorra).
Emily Bernard is a professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of
Vermont. Her publications include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes
and Carl Van Vechten (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Some of My
Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004), which was chosen as a New York Public
Library Book for the Teen Age, 2006. Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009),
a book she coauthored with Deborah Willis, received an NAACP Image Award in spring 2010.
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White was published by Yale University Press in 2012.
Mary Jo Bona, Professor of Italian American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, is the author of
By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010) and
Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1999). She is editor of
The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction (1994), co-editor of
Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (2006), and series editor of Multiethnic Literature for SUNY Press.
Jenn Brandt is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at High Point University, where
she is also an assistant professor of English. Brandt’s work focuses on gender and cultural
studies in literature, popular film, and television. She is particularly interested in the ways
in which politics shape and reflect contemporary literature and culture.
