Edvige Giunta

A regular contributor to Italian American studies and a founder of the field, Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (Palgrave 2002). Collaboration, community-building, and supporting the work of other writers has been central in her work as a writer and an educator. She has coedited six anthologies: with Louise DeSalvo, The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (The Feminist Press, 2002); with Jennifer Gillan and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Italian American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2003); with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (MLA, 2010); with Joseph Sciorra, Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (University of Mississippi Press, 2014); with Nancy Caronia, Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (Fordham University Press, 2015); and, with Mary Anne Trasciatti, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire (New Village Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Susan Koppelman Award for the best anthology, multi-authored, or edited book in feminist studies in popular and American culture.

Working closely with publishers, she has promoted the recognition of Italian and Italian American women writers. Paper Fish by Tina De Rosa, Umbertina by Helen Barolini, and Vertigo by Louise DeSalvo were reprinted by The Feminist Press with her accompanying essays.

She has been coeditor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy and poetry editor of The Women’s Studies Quarterly, and has edited special issues of literary journals. Her writing appears in many anthologies, journals, and magazines, such as Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Barrow Street, December Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Creative Nonfiction, Words Without Borders, and The Adroit Journal. In Italy, where she published Dire l’indicibile: il memoir delle autrici italo americane, her writing has appeared in El Ghibli, DWF, TutteStorie, Leggendaria as well as in anthologies, including the volume Padri (Iacobelli).

As a Professor of English at New Jersey City University, she has trained scores of students in the art of memoir and has taught memoir for writers of all backgrounds and levels in the US and Italy. At NJCU, she has created the first course exclusively devoted to the study of the Triangle fire.