Meet Italian American Author Joanna Clapps Herman

Author event: Growing up Italian in America

Thursday, October 6 7:00 p.m.

Hagaman Memorial Library

"I was born in 1944, but raised in the fifteenth century." With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer’s Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother’s piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn’t plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture—its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.

Joanna recently appeared at the Generoso Pope Foundation in Tuckahoe New York. Check out the article below from the Bronxville-EastchesterPatch about her presentation there last Thursday night, September 29:

Joanna will explain what inspired her to write her family's story and will be available after her talk to sign copies of the book. The book will be available for sale at $20 each and cash or check will be accepted.

Please join us for a delightful evening with this amazing local author in celebration of Italian Heritage Month. Please call the library to register or visit our events page.