Paola Corso is a writer and professor whose fiction and poetry are set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mills. Among her awards and honors is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award.  Corso’s new poetry books are The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the 2012 Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, featuring Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and in sweatshops today. She is a lecturer at Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA Program and also teaches at the City University of New York. 

Maria Terrone is the author of Eye to Eye (May 2014, Bordighera Press); A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Award, Ashland Poetry Press) and The Bodies We Were Loaned (The Word Works), as well as a chapbook American Gothic, Take 2 (Finishing Line Press.) Her work, which has been published in French and Farsi and nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in magazines including Poetry, Ploughshares, Hudson Review, and Poetry International and in 20 anthologies.  She was one of 10 Queens-based authors commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to write an essay for its 2012 performance project, “sillspotting  nyc.” 

SIDEWALK: For June 14, a cover of $8 includes a complimentary beverage. 

DIRECTIONS: By Subway, F to Second Avenue or #6 to Astor Place.  IAWA’s 2014 2^nd SATURDAYS are held on odd months at Cornelia Street Café and during even months at Sidewalk Café.  

About Italian American Writers Association (IAWA)

IAWA aims to promote Italian American literature by encouraging the writing, reading, publication, distribution, translation and study of Italian American writing. Since 1991, IAWA has given voice to writers through its Open Reading series held every second Saturday of the month at Cornelia Street Café on odd months and at the Sidewalk Café on even months. For membership information, please visit www.iawa.net .  To learn more about IAWA, also visit the Italian American Writers Cafe blog at http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/italian-american-writers-cafe

Contacts:

Maria Lisella, IAWA Board Member and Co-Curator

Phone: (718) 777-1178

Email:  [email protected]

Amy Barone, IAWA Board Member

Phone:  (646) 942-4972

Email:  [email protected]