Ciao, buongiorno!
Welcome! I'm an author, a proud second-generation Italian American, an art lover, and a traveler who left a career as a magazine editor and freelance writer/editor to realize my childhood dream of moving to Italy. With two suitcases, a backpack, a large dog in an enormous crate, and a cat carrier slung over one shoulder (cat included)—and, thankfully, with the encouragement of my sons—I took the leap in 2018, trading the San Francisco Bay Area for a hill town in central Italy.
Was it the right choice? Yes. If you want to know more about that, hop on over to my Substack, "Italicus: a writer's life in Italy."
A year after I moved here, in spring 2019, Regal House Publishing released my debut novel, The Wild Impossibility, which later won a Nautilus Prize in Fiction. I'm currently shopping around two more novels, one of which is set in Italy, and I'm writing my first nonfiction book, on immigration and my Italian roots. In the meantime, I share my thoughts on Italy, travel, art, books, genealogy, history, and whatever else seems relevant at "Italicus."
Though I'd always been passionate about books, I didn't start writing until my 40s. Growing up in Northern Virginia, I was a high school theatre-and-music kid; I stuck with theatre in college too, at William and Mary. Later I earned an MFA in writing at the University of San Francisco. I joined the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, participated in Monday Night Playground (a theatre project), and spent thousands of happy hours in the rehearsal studies at San Francisco Ballet, where I worked as a contract writer for 16 years.
Still, my childhood dream of living in Italy stuck with me, and I decided to make it happen. Leaving the U.S., though, also meant leaving the communities I'd found. (When people ask me what I miss about the U.S., my answer is "my family and friends." Okay, and the Bay Area weather.) I've found new connections, of course, particularly through friends and a language exchange group. But a few years ago, when I reconnected with a playwright friend in the U.S., I told him I envied him his performing-arts community. His reply? "Then start a theatre group." I laughed him off, then promptly did just that. Teatro Immediato was born in 2024 to present new, short works as staged readings to Italian audiences. As of this writing, we're in rehearsals for our second season.
I'm a wanderer at heart, geographically and creatively. Stories, poems, Substack posts, plays, books—I love them all. But I put novels in a unique category, because being immersed in a story and characters that I created, which then take on their own life in revision after revision, gives me true joy. Fiction, whether I'm reading it or writing it, is my escape.