SAVE THE DATE
When: Monday, April 11, 2016, 5:30-7:00 pm
Where: Room 316, Marillac Hall, Queens Campus
“Women’s Writing: Never Done”
Maria Lisella, Queens Poet Laureate
… who will talk about writing as a poet, journalist, essayist, and curator
Native New Yorker, and Queens born and bred, Maria Lisella is the sixth winner in the competition for Queens Poet Laureate, 2015-2018, and the first Italian American. She is the author of the collection, Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), and the two chapbooks, Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Paterson Literary Review, Feile Festa, Voices in Italian Americana, First Literary Review-East, and New Verse News, and will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, published by Red Hen Press. She is a charter member of Brevitas, an online poetry circle that stages the Festival of the Short Poem, annually, at the Bowery Poetry Club, and publishes a selection. She is on the Board of the Italian American Writers Association and co-curates its readings, the longest running literary series in Greenwich Village. Additionally, she is the Vice President of the educational organization, the Vito Marcantonio Forum. As an award-winning travel writer and editor, she has visited 60 countries and is currently a New York Expert for USA Today, and heads the social media committee for the New York Travel Writers Association.
“Thieves in the Family reads like a scrapbook of memories from working-class Queens and a collection of postcards from the Global Village. Maria Lisella, “a Mediterranean hybrid with the suspicious heart of a peasant on both sides of the Atlantic,” is attuned to our world. Like a satellite dish, she picks up not only local broadcasts from her Italian American neighborhood but also distant signals from places that are transforming both Astoria and Italy: Cuba, Ecuador, India, Mozambique, and Poland. A citizen of Babel, Lisella teaches us to speak in tongues and to survive in a world that is simultaneously falling apart and coming together. If you have been caught in the crossfire between tradition and desire, have fudged a job application or a citizenship exam, have begged, borrowed, or stolen to nurse a sick parent or feed a hungry child, read this book. Thieves in the Family will steal your heart and rifle your brain.”
–Anthony Di Renzo, author of Bitter Greens and Trinàcria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily
Thieves in the Family can be purchased at the event for $18.00, for Lisella to sign; cash only.
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