Book presentation of Italian Americans on the Page: Revisiting the Classics and Exploring New Voices with editors Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J. Gravano. Moderated by Fred L. Gardaphé and Anthony Julian Tamburri.
“This is an invaluable addition to the field of the Italian American studies. While offering new critical approaches to both canonical and noncanonical works, it also extends our understanding of LGBTQ writing in poetry, fiction, and dramatic literature, and it expands the coverage of Italian Americana to include the North American contributions of Canadian dramatists whose work builds on the coverage of traditional concerns with family life and turmoil.”
— Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University
Please RSVP by emailing [email protected].
This novel is told from the perspective of the irrepressible yet lonely Christina, an Italian American teen in 1960s Catholic Boston. In the course of searching for a way out of her messy milieu, she discovers the never-canonized St. Christina the Astonishing, who preferred birds to people, and immediately recognizes a personal lodestar. If only she could make her eleventh-grade teacher Sister Coronada see that Christina craves the kind of attention holy martyrs enjoy and deserves a better future than the conventional one that parents Joe and Rita Falcone have mapped out for her.
“As hilarious as David Sedaris and mental in the best possible way, Christina has just become my higher power.”
—Jennifer Belle, author of Swanna in Love
Discussion led by Siân Gibby, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY.
