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“Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy” – Book Presentation

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi in conversation with Jonathan Galassi, her editor at FSG, will talk about her life as a writer and why her book, Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy, has become a classic on diversity and tolerance.

 

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Wallis Wilde-Menozzi,  American poet, essayist, novelist and translator, has lived in Parma, Italy since 1981. In 2020, Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy appeared, more than twenty years after its first publication, newly framed by Patricia Hampl and the author. This edition will be followed, FSG, Fall, 2021, with her most recent work– Silence and Silences, a highly anticipated meditation on the infinite search for meanings in silence. Her book, The Other Side of the Tiber, FSG 2013, won several commendations. For information on her other books — poetry, fiction, translations — visit her website: Walliswilde-menozzi.com

Jonathan Galassi is the President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the publishing house he has helped shape since 1986. He has long been an enthusiast of Italian literature, and has translated the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. He has published three collections of poems and a novel, Muse, which was translated by Guanda in 2016.

In the 1980s, the American poet Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved permanently with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a sophisticated city in northern Italy, where he became a professor of biology. Her search for rootedness in the city that was to be her home introduced her to complexities in her identity as she migrated into another language that became her daily means for both personal and literary exchanges. The local resistance to change perceived as individualistic led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull and challenge of difference and discover the courage she needed for artistic freedom.

Join us for what will be a rich conversation between two people with deep connections to and feelings for Italian and American culture.

 

  • Organized by: ICI