Writers as diverse as Mario Puzo, Tina De Rosa, Adria Bernardi, Carole Maso and Don DeLillo address the post-modern condition through Italian-American culture and history. Like other ethnic groups in the United States, Italian-American writers have written about migration and assimilation experiences, the struggle against discrimination, and the challenges of contemporary society including war, crime, illness, labor activism and civil rights. My study and training includes a range of literatures from the British, American, and Anglophone literary traditions, but I write about Italian-American texts in the context of Multi-Ethnic American literature. Italian-American texts are written in the English language with some Italian dialect phrases included. I research Italian-American literature, which is a specialization in the field of American literature. When I started my Masters degree a year or two later, I found a rich body of scholarship on Italian-American writers, which paved the way for my work and that of my colleagues. Most of my traditional undergraduate education had focused on British literature as an English major, and I had never even thought about the possibility of Italian-American literature before that moment. My family migrated from Sicily to the United States in the early 1900s, but I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago in the 1970s and 80s after the old Italian neighborhoods had been dispersed. Those students turned that challenge back to me, and asked me where I had found my stories. One class in particular was very sharp and reflective. I would tell the students that they had to go out of their way to find their family’s stories if they weren’t reading them in school.

My students were reading writers like Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Richard Rodriquez, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Rudolfo Anaya, and Dee Brown.

I discovered Italian American literature while teaching Multi-Ethnic American literature as a high school teacher. How did you get interested in Italian-American studies? Tell us a bit about your interdepartmental teaching and education. A great deal of your experience has bridged the gap between English studies and Italian-American studies.

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