The Living and the Dead: A Memoir Workshop with Edvige Giunta

Learn how to develop your memoir writing craft with Edvige Giunta, a seasoned narrative memoir writer and professor.
Memoirs hold the key to time travel. A letter, a dish, an item of furniture, a door, a street, a face, a gesture, a smell, a sound, a touch—anything conjured through memory can become a passport for traveling into the past, for crossing the divide between the living and the dead. In immigrant memory, whether one is a recent immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, these crossings are part of an invaluable project of recovery, reclamation, rewriting, and understanding.

Through prompts that cross temporal borders and break geographical and identity boundaries, this generative workshop will lead participants to lands where the unexpected and the forgotten appear on the page, where we speak to ghosts and, listening intently, become their scribes.

This memoir workshop is offered in conjunction with the Italian American Studies Association and the University of Pittsburgh.

Note Bene: Speaker is remote, audience is in-person. Workshop attendees will get to explore collections from the Heinz History Center’s archive, including letters, photographs, immigration documents, and newspapers.
About Edvige Giunta
Edvige Giunta is a professor of English at New Jersey City University and has trained scores of students in the art of memoir. Her articles, essays, memoirs, and poems have been published in English and Italian in anthologies, journals, and literary magazines. Her last book “Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire”, coedited with Mary Anne Trasciatti, was published in March 2022 by New Village Press.

Giunta became interested in Italian American women writers in the early 1990s. She worked closely with the Feminist Press to reprint such classics as “Paper Fish,”” Umbertina,” and “Vertigo,” for which she wrote introductory essays. She is the author of “Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors” and coeditor of six anthologies, including “The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture,” “Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora,” and “Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo.”