An evening of poetry with Dr. Michelle Reale, reading from her most recent book Confini: Poems of refugees in Sicily. (Cervena Barva Press, 2021)  Her ethnography in Sicily and her work with refugees there sought, and continues to seek, to excavate firsthand accounts of the lived experiences of those who left their homes for freedom and safety.

From the reviews: … she has created, from the refugees’ accounts, poems that recount the traumas that forced them to leave their homes, and their yearning for the familiar landscapes they may never see again. They speak to the suffering they endured crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy vessels; of the experience of being stateless, homeless, without work. “My cap is the only roof over my head,” says “Suleiman.” Their voices are anguished, ironic, matter-of-fact, and angry as they recount the quotidian but disorienting realities of adjusting to a new and often hostile society.

- George De Stefano, author and journalist

Dr. Michelle Reale is a professor at Arcadia University. She is the author of seven monographs in her field of library science. She is the founding and managing editor of OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She is an Italian-American poet and the author of numerous collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and  Blood Memory (Idea Press, 2020).  In her work, Dr. Reale troubles various aspects of Italian-American culture and the Italian-American experience such as immigration history, narrative inheritance, inherited trauma, organized crime, damaging stereotypes, and the pervasive mythologization of the culture in general.