Italian American Writers

Laurette Folk’as fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, won the Eric Hoffer Award for General Fiction and is described by Kirkus Reviews as “[A] haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.”  Her third novel, Eleison, is now out from Bordighera Press and was listed as a quarter finalist for the Booklife Prize. Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program.

Danielle Jones is a poet and educator, with over a decade of experience in arts administration. She holds an MFA from UMass Boston. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Consequence Magazine, Memorious, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artist Award, and a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. She teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she directs the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival and manages YAS Press.

Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, The Common, Nimrod, Pangyrus and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston.

Carla Panciera’s collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was indexed by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.  She was the James E. Kilgore scholar in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers Conference and is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant in Creative Nonfiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, was released in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA.  She has also published three collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love and One Trail of Longing, Another of String(Bordighera).