Where You Live: Writing About Yourself and Your Family

    Improve listing Presented by

Learn the art of memoir writing "Where You Live: Writing about Yourself and Your Family," a workshop hosted by Italian American Collection Scholar-in-Residence Joseph Bathanti.

Participants will come away with a story - a memoir - about where they and their families live and have lived. The workshop is designed to get participants thinking about specific episodes that in some way exemplify their identities as Italian-Americans and how that very decided ethnicity has influenced them, especially as it pertains to living in Pittsburgh, though other locales might be involved as well.

Joseph Bathanti, the Italian American Collection's Scholar-In-Residence, will talk about memory and read a few of his own pieces dealing with the topic at hand that illustrate how memory, for better or worse (accurate and inaccurate), figures into personal writing.

Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop old family photographs and any other familial artifacts that generate memories.

About Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti is the Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., he has BA & MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Bathanti came to North Carolina as a VISTA Volunteer in 1976 to work with prison inmates. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC where he is also the Writer-in-Residence for the University’s Watauga Global Community and Director of Writing in the Field. Bathanti is the author of eight books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal; Land of Amnesia; Restoring Sacred Art; Sonnets of The Cross; and Concertina. His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001 by Banks Channel Books in Wilmington, NC. His latest novel, Coventry, winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award, was published by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC.