The University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce that author Antonio DiRenzo will give a lecture and fiction reading at 4:00 PM on Monday, March 10, in the new Co-Op bookstore located in Storrs Center.
DiRenzo’s lecture, titled “Manzoni's Blot: Trinàcria and the Fiction of Italian History,” will include reading from his novel Trinàcria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily. He other fiction and nonfiction books include the popular Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen (State University of New York Press, 2010). His latest work, After the Fair is Over, is under consideration by SUNY Press for their Excelsior Editions series.
A former advertising agent, New York native DiRenzo is currently a professor of writing at Ithaca College. DiRenzo focuses on the ongoing culture war between Italian humanism and American business. DiRenzo notes that, during his time in corporate America, he “learned how capitalism transubstantiates bits and pieces of [his] heritage into” novelties and now works to right these wrongs in his satirical works.
In a recent review of Trinàcria for the online magazine i-Italy, critic Tom Verso praises DiRenzo as “a Southern Italian Culture Warrior” whose “vocabulary is product of the complex historical, psychological, ethical and aesthetic cultural nuances he is trying to convey to the readers.”
The reading, co-sponsored by the University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program and the UConn Humanities House, is free and open to the public. The new Co-op bookstore is located at One Royce Circle, Unit 101 in Storrs Center. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Program’s website at www.creativewriting.uconn.edu
Co-Sponsored By:
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
For more information, contact: Sean Forbes at sean.forbes@uconn.edu