Lecture: Reclaiming the Legacy of Our Italian Grandmothers

Juliet Grames will discuss her prizewinning novel, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, the story of a Calabrian family that emigrates to New England in the harsh years between the World Wars, and the novel’s nonfiction inspirations in the immigrant stories of her southern Italian grandparents.

Juliet Grames was born into a tight-knit Italian-American family in Hartford, Connecticut, and settled in the Westerly area in 2018. She is the author of the national and international bestseller The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (Ecco/HarperCollins), which has been translated into 9 languages and received Italy’s Premio Cetraro for Contributions to Southern Italian Literature, and the forthcoming The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (Knopf, July 2024). She studied history at the University of Oxford and graduated magna cum laude from Columbia before embarking on a career in book publishing. She is SVP, Editorial Director at Soho Press

Note: All lectures in the lecture series hosted by the Dante Society of Westerly are live events only and are not recorded. They are neither streamed online nor available afterwards as recordings.

Lectures are free and open to the public.