Meatball and Spaghetti Artist Podcast

​Christina Marrocco works in memoir, short story, long fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Silverbirch Press, The Laurel Review, House Mountain Review, VIA, Ovunque Siamo, and Red Fern Press. She lives outside of Chicago where she teaches Creative Writing and other courses at Elgin Community College

Federica Santini is Professor of Italian and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University, where she coordinates the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature from UCLA and a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Siena, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Plath Profiles, Rogue Agent, and Italian Culture, among others, as well as in many edited volumes. As a translator, she has published translations of US poets for Mondadori and Nino Aragno, as well as translations of Italian poets for the University of Toronto Press. She has authored or co-edited six volumes, among which her monograph, Io era una bella figura una volta: Viaggio nella poesia di ricerca del secondo Novecento (Scritture, 2013) and her poetry chapbook, Unearthed (Kelsay Books 2021).

Opened in 1910 by Ernesto Rossi as Rossi's Libreria, the shop began as a music store and publishing company.

Joseph Sciorra, assistant director of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College has said that E. Rossi & Sons is a repository and archive for Italian-American popular culture. Its collection is unprecedented.

For more information go to: https://erossico.com/

Link to a fabulous documentary on the history of E. Rossi & Sons: http://www.folkstreams.net/film,174

Anthony Julian Tamburri is the Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY) and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures. His research interests lie in literature, cinema, semiotics, interpretation theory, and cultural studies.

Joey Nicoletti is the author of 4 poetry chapbooks and 4 full-length collections, including Boombox Serenade (BlazeVOX, 2019), and Cannoli Gangster, which was selected as a finalist for the 2009 Steel Toe Books Award. His Pushcart Prize-nominated work has appeared in Ovunque Siamo, Gradiva, Voices in Italian Americana, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, among other journals, magazines, and anthologies. A graduate of the University of Iowa, New Mexico State University, and Sarah Lawrence College, Joey teaches creative writing at SUNY Buffalo State.

Kathy Curto teaches at The Writing Institute and Montclair State University. She is the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood, published by Bordighera Press. 

Her work has been featured on NPR, in the essay collection, Listen to Your Mother:  What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now, and in The New York Times, Barrelhouse, La Voce di New York, Drift, Talking Writing, The Inquisitive Eater, Voices in Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo and Lumina. 

She has been the recipient of the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship, the Montclair State University Engaged Teaching Fellowship and also serves on the faculty of the Joe Papaleo Writers’ Workshop in Cetara, Italy. 

Kathy lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their four children.

Rebecca Bauman is Associate Professor of Italian at Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, where she also teaches in the Department of Film, Media and Performing Arts. She has published essays and book chapters on Italian melodrama, masculinity in Italian cinema, and mafia movies in such publications as the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and Italian Studies. She is Film and Digital Media Reviews editor for the Italian American Review and is Chair of the Columbia Seminar in Modern Italian Studies. 

Edvige (Edi) Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors.

Among her books are Personal Effects (co-edited with Nancy Caronia) and Embroidered Stories, an anthology on domestic needlework in the Italian diaspora (edited with Joseph Sciorra).

Edi is a Professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she has trained scores of students, many first-generation immigrants, in the art of memoir. She has completed No Confetti For the Dead, a memoir moored in the space between her homeland of Sicily and North America (with Mary Anne Trasciatti).

Currently, Edi is completing an anthology of personal essay on the Triangle Fire.

George Guida is Professor at the New York City College of Technology's English Department.  

He is the author of Pugilistic: Poems, The Sleeping Gulf: Poems, The Pope Stories and Spectacles of Themselves: Essays in Italian American Popular Culture and Literature.  

Joanna Clapps Herman is an Italian American writer, editor and poet. She is the author of three books of prose, editor of two anthologies, and her essays and writing have been published in many anthologies and literary journals.

Among the books Joanna has written are When I am Italian, The Anarchist Bastard and No Long and Not Yet: Short Stories.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), which was selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her chapbook, After Bird was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine and The Sycamore Review and, most recently, has appeared in Verse Daily, The DMQ Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest). Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Series at I AM Books in Boston.

Marianne Leone has had roles in several films, including True Love 1989), Goodfellas (1990).  Her longest-running recurring role was on the The Sopranos.

She is also a writer. Her book Knowing Jesse was written in 2007 and more recently her book Ma Speaks Up was published by Beacon Press.  She has also contributed to Ovunque Siamo’s publications.