An honest voice in Italian paradise.
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I’m a writer in my dreams, writer in my heart, writing in the world. I want to feel the fear and go. Discern and integrate. Push the limits. Be brave. Be present.
Literary Contests
My short story “Chiaroscuro” has been shortlisted for the 2025 Gilmer Prize, sponsored by Camel: An Illustrated Journal of Narrative, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Winners and honorable mentions to be announced in June 2025. Watch this space!
Short fiction
“Parisian Pleasures” in Pure Slush, Great Cities Vol. I: Paris. (Follow link to purchase!)
“Apex Traveler” in Impspired (UK, Issue 28 online in April 2024, subsequently featured in Issue 14 in print, May 2024)
“Witches, Inc.” in Idle Ink (UK, April 2024)
“Patriarchy I: Welcome to the Patriarchy,” “Patriarchy II: Grand Traverse County,” and “Patriarchy III: The Heart Wages Its Confused Battles,” in Tiny Molecules, (Canada, March 2024)
“Corporate Duck Duck Goose,” Fiction on the Web (UK, November 2023)
Translations
“Interview with Poetry Editor Monica Sharp,” Open Doors Review Issue 5, December 2023.
Poetry
Aayo Magazine (Ivory Coast and Hull, UK), “Look deep into my eyes,” March 2024
Impspired (Lincoln, UK – online April 2023; in print May 2023)
“Letterpress”
“XI. Behind”
“Poet’s Lament”
Across the Margin (Asheville, NC – February 2023)
“I Never Did Find Out”
“Sequoyah”
“Art Carnies”
Writer’s Block (Amsterdam)
(February 2023, Issue No. 49)
(Goteborg, Sweden)
“Clementine”
“Limoni”
“Tuscan Thunder”
(February 2025)
“Carnevale”
“Giurovich and Minni, or the Two Caffès”
“Windows”
“Florence: Everyman”
“Secret Sommelier”
(January 2023)
Bosphorus Review of Books (Istanbul)
“What the Gods Remember” (January 2023)
“Eden” (February 2022)
Adamah Media (Manchester, UK)
“Banana Noster” (March 2022)
“Muse in Ravenna” (May 2022)
“Mountains” (October 2021)
“Basho’s Garden” (October 2021)
“Perseids” (October 2021)
“Fragile 2020” (October 2021)
“Prophets Find Me” (October 2021)
Fevers of the Mind (Tennessee, USA)
The Empath Dies in the End: Issue 6
Inspire Me: Issue 8
A Poetry Showcase for Monica Sharp (November 2021), featuring:
“Galen”
“Black Shuck”
“Global Perambulations”
“Ghost Ship”
“Keats and I”
“Mr. Brown in Pandemic. A Spenserian Sonnet”
“The Dream Woods”
Synapse (Seattle – June 1999)
“Explanation”
Essays
Adamah Media (Manchester, UK)
“The Italian presepe: history and meaning of an ancient Christmas tradition” (January 2025)
“The Enduring Joy of Reading Shakespeare” (December 2023)
“Rain, Rain, Don’t Go Away” (October 2022)
“Can We Be Curious?” (October 2022)
“The Lonely Life of the Translator” (January 2022)
“Life in the Too-Fast Lane” (October 2021)
“Why Do Americans Never Take Holidays?” (September 2021) This piece went viral!
Romeing Firenze (Rome, Italy)
“Elegant Personal Fragrance: A Florentine Tradition” (October 2022)
“Emanuele Giannelli: Mr. Arbitrium at Basilica San Lorenzo” (September 2022)
“Henry Moore in Florence” (September 2022)
“Inside Banksy: Unauthorized Exhibition” (January 2023)
“Olafur Eliasson Nel Tuo Tempo at the Palazzo Strozzi” (September 2022)
“In Memoriam: Elisabeth Robbins Cole” (February 2022)
My agency work includes culture and lifestyle pieces for Santamargherita, a luxury interiors company based in Verona, Italy; pieces for Santamargherita are posted at https://usa.santamargherita.net/sm-blog/. I’ve also created content for diverse American clients including the ActiveNetwork, Avocados From Mexico, and Texas Farm Bureau Insurance (TFBI). I particularly enjoyed penning this amusing quiz for TFBI.
I wrote for Where: Seattle magazine, a luxury travel publication franchise, in the late nineties. I was also an active patron of the Richard Hugo House. I published poetry in the Seattle literary magazine Synapse.
I created new online content for Demand Media Studios (now Leaf Group), on topics ranging from day-tripping on the Mediterranean isle of Capri to guidance for U.S. lawful permanent residents traveling to the Virgin Islands, and contributed a chapter on immigration in Italy to Buongiorno Arezzo!, a publication of the University of Oklahoma press.
I wrote a regular immigration column under a byline for LexisNexis Bender’s Immigration Bulletin titled “Consider the Campus,” covering U.S. immigration topics impacting higher education. For an example, see “The DREAM Act: A Campus Perspective.” Opinion pieces I’ve published include immigration advocacy “Fighting in Libya Affects Students in Oklahoma,” picked up by the Tulsa World, the Norman Transcript, and the Daily Oklahoman. In 2011-2012, I was a regular panelist on radio for “World Views” on the NPR member station KGOU hosted by Dr. Zach Messitte, then the Dean of the College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
I have several pieces of longer fiction in draft.
In A Long Arc, a Scottish family’s arduous journey unfolds across continents as indentured servants in colonial America, their legacy etched along the Raritan River and beyond, until the American Revolution bitterly divides them.
The story continues in Forgotten Son. Disinherited and disenfranchised as the worthless youngest son, a tenacious Scottish-American orphan carves his own path to family and belonging amidst prejudice and the harsh realities of the American frontier – finding love where he least expects it.
The Real Muse relates how, under the love-bombing spell of a famous and whimsical painter, a smitten young artist awakens to his manipulative intent to exploit her talents for his empire, forcing her to choose between his version of love and the liberation of her dreams.
Aunt Bee examines family relationships in detail – how they limit us, nurture us, and ultimately define us.
The Kommandant’s Palazzo is set in German-occupied Florence during World War II, where two assimilated Jewish sisters navigate the treacherous landscape with skill and audacity, not just clinging to survival within the shadows but audaciously carving out a life amidst the looming threat. We live in a historic building in an apartment that is rumored to have sheltered Italian Jews during the war, hence my inspiration.
In The Irish Pilgrim, an intellectually adventurous Irish woman ahead of her time flees the turmoil of Tudor England and embarks on a transformative pilgrimage across fifteenth-century Europe, her journey culminating in the ancient Italian monastery of Bobbio, a sanctuary echoing with the spirit of her homeland. This first novel foray gave me an excuse to write about the European places close to my heart and to which I longed to return when we were still living in the U.S. prior to 2016.
