La Famiglia

Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry. Essays. Italian American Studies. Although it is true that I distanced myself from my youth, of course (everybody does), I never distanced myself from my ethnicity. I simply write poems and stories—and, of recent decades, essays and memoirs—as they occur to me, and if later on I feel that older material can be mined, transformed, or linked together to form longer works or sequences, so be it. That’s what I have done in this book.

Author Biography

Lewis Putnam Turco is the author of some fifty volumes in the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including books, chapbooks and monographs. Founder of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and of the creative writing program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968, Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera BiLingual Poetry Prize in 1998. In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation. Turco’s many books include LA FAMIGLIA: THE FAMILY, A BOOK OF FEARS: UN LIBRO DI FOBIE, and SHAKING THE FAMILY TREE: A REMEMBRANCE.