Edvige Giunta is an associate professor of English at New Jersey City University where she teaches memoir as well as other writing and literature courses. She has spent the last decade writing and organizing cultural events about Italian American women authors and getting their works published and reprinted. Her recent publications include Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (Palgrave, 2002), Dire l'indicibile: Il memoir delle autrici italo americane (University of Siena, 2002), The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (The Feminist Press, 2002), coedited with Louise DeSalvo, and Italian American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2003), coedited with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Award for Fiction and Non-Fiction. She has edited/co-edited special issues of the journals VIA and TutteStorie devoted to Italian American women, and A Tavola: Food, Tradition and Community Among Italian Americans. Her articles, review, memoir, and poetry have been published in many journals and anthologies. Her essays have been included in the reprints by The Feminist Press of such Italian American classics as Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1996), Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1999), and Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (2002). The former poetry editor of The Women’s Studies Quarterly, she serves actively on its Board. She has been profiled in The New York Times for her work in Italian American studies and won the 2003 Teacher of the Year Award for Higher Education given by the Association of Italian American Educators. She is currently at work on two anthologies, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture for the Options for Teaching Series of the Modern Language Association ,  co-edited with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, and Biancheria: Domestic Needlework in the Italian Diaspora, coedited with Joseph Sciorra.

 

Jacqueline Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. She has published several articles on representations of gender and working-class identity in visual and popular culture and is the author of Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States, 1933-1945 (BGSU Popular Press, 1998). Her current research focuses on the construction of working-class subjectivities within educational discourse and cultural theory.

 

David Sansevere, Jr. is working on a double major in Writing and Literature at New Jersey City University, with a minor in Communication Design. Some of his short fiction is slated to be published in the forthcoming issue of Paths. His illustration work is featured in the Hyperion Books political satire The Republican Playbook . David has also had sculptures exhibited at the Puffin Cultural Forum, and in November of 2005, he participated in the Yatai Vendor Project with acclaimed Japanese artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu.