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.
Forthcoming new poetry! “Warning Labels” to be published in Banshee (Oxford, UK) Fall 2024.
Interviews
“Interview with Poetry Editor Monica Sharp,” Open Doors Review Issue 5, December 2023.
Short fiction
“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)
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)
Mediterranean Poetry (Goteborg, Sweden – January 2023)
“Carnevale”
“Giurovich and Minni, or the Two Caffès”
“Windows”
“Florence: Everyman”
“Secret Sommelier”
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 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.
A Long Arc is the imagined tale of my family’s emigration from Scotland to the Americas as indentured servants in East New Jersey on the banks of the Raritan River and beyond. It follows the family’s events in fifteenth-century Scotland until the 1685 departure of our paterfamilias, William Sharp, then continues in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, finishing in Kentucky and Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, just before the Civil War. I wrote it in a rush after months of research in primary and secondary document archives.
The Things We Learn is a coming-of-age roman à clef, set mostly in Seattle in the late nineties. Riddle and Rhyme is a contemporaneous account of a woman’s exploration of a tangled relationship and how she moves from uncertainty to commitment. Aunt Bee examines in detail family relationships – how they limit us, nurture us, and ultimately define us.
The Kommandant’s Palazzo takes place in German-occupied Florence during World War II. The protagonists are assimilated Jews who live by their wits to not only survive but thrive in the threatening environment. We live in the Palazzo Wilson-Gattai in an apartment that is said to have sheltered Italian Jews during the war – becoming a source of my inspiration.
