AFTER ITALY

"After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage" is the story of marriages across three generations. Starting from a marriage brokered to facilitate immigration from Southern Italy to Braddock, PA, a steel town outside of Pittsburgh, before and immediately after WWII, this memoir explores the multigenerational impact of arranged marriage.

The story of two marriages gone bad and the fallout on three generations of a Calabrian immigrant family. Anna Monardo's mother and grandmother were teenage brides matched with older men to facilitate immigration from Calabria to Braddock, PA, a steel town outside of Pittsburgh. In contrast, Monardo got engaged to a fellow writer at thirty-five. As the first in her family born in the U.S., she assumed she'd have an "American-style" marriage - joyous alchemy of passion, companionship, and equity. But her family's legacy of unhappiness in marriage became her legacy, too, almost as if she were an emotional "mule," smuggling the dark story of one generation into the next without knowing the value or exact nature of what had been strapped onto her. ANNA MONARDO grew up in Pittsburgh, with strong ties to her Calabrian family. Her first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday), set largely in southern Italy, was translated into German, Norwegian, and Danish; featured in the Selected Shorts reading series at Symphony Space in New York City; and nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award and recommended for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Excerpts from her second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia (Doubleday), first appeared in Prairie Schooner and were nominated for Pushcart Prizes; one excerpt was awarded a Hugh J. Luke Award for Short Fiction. Her work has been anthologized in The Dream Book Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women, Five Years of Fourth Genre, and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers. Excerpts from After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage were published in Cimarron Review, Creative Nonfiction, Exquisite Pandemic, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, More, and Ovunque Siamo. Monardo's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Sun, Birmingham Poetry Review, HuffPost, Indiana Review, Poets & Writers, and other magazines and journals. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as three fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, she teaches in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Visit annamonardo.com