About me
I am currently the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. I received a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and an MA in Creative Writing from University of Westminster, in London.
I write both in English and Italian, and I am mostly a fiction and creative nonfiction writer. My work explores gender, mental illness, addiction, with a focus on the effects of abuse on the body and the perception of the self; I find myself writing a lot about domestic violence and generational trauma. As of now, I am also particularly interested in rock narratives, especially the way rock music and aesthetics challenge our ideas of transgression and normalcy; my work also looks at the relationship between humans and animals, with an emphasis on the meanings that humans assign to nature and animals in our attempt to understand "the other," and ourselves.
No Big Deal, my first book, coming out on April 19th, 2024 by Nottetempo Edizioni, is a rock 'n' roll novel about abuse, addiction, and the shaky place that women occupy in the music industry.
I grew up in the beautiful city of Livorno, Italy, right by the sea, and I did my undergraduate studies at University of Florence. I started studying abroad at nineteen, when I was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship to spend a semester at University of Oslo, Norway; later, I received the Beatrice Caselli Scholarship, which gave me the opportunity to spend a semester at Sarah Lawrence College, NY. That's where I fell in love with the idea of writing in English and studying creative writing.
Since then, I have been writing in English and Italian; I've also been working in translation, and I've been particularly fascinated by prose that travels across languages and works written by non-native speaker of English. Pollo Fritto e Disperazione, my first collection of selected works by American writers in translation, came out in 2022 from Digressioni Editore.
My stories and essays have appeared in several Italian, American, and British journals. For a list of selected works, see Publications.
In 2017, I moved to Stillwater, OK to pursue a PhD in English, with a focus on Creative Writing. I fell in love with Oklahoma, its animals, its people, and what I call its "trashy wildness." At Oklahoma State University, I taught for my first time and found myself at home in the classroom. I taught several sections of Composition online and in person, but also Technical Writing and Introduction to Creative Writing.
I feel energized by the experience of discussing writing and literature with students, and now I have a wonderful job at Gettysburg College, in rural Pennsylvania, where I have been teaching introductory and advanced classes of creative writing. Gettysburg College gave me the opportunity to teach a memoir class, a class about animal writing, a flash fiction and nonfiction class, and a class about writing across cultures.
For a complete list of classes, academic services, and so on, please consult the page CV.