East&West Dialogue: FROM PIAZZAS TO PARKAS — ON ITALIANS BECOMING CANADIANS

In collaboration with the Writers’ Union of Canada, we are thrilled to have three Italian- Canadian writers as guest speakers to discuss their stories of immigration. Woven into their stories will be the personal, social, historical, and political factors that influence how an Italian immigrant may “become” Canadian and what “being Canadian” means for the various generations.

Generations of immigrants to Canada have multi-faceted experiences. The discussion will hit on issues such as tensions and conflicts with the dominant Anglo-Canadian or Quebecois culture, discrimination, and negative and positive stereotyping of Italian-Canadians. Among Canadian immigrants, generational tensions cannot be avoided and our guests will consider conflict between first generation parents and children: how second and third generation Italian-Canadians differ from the former and how the latter connect to and express their Italian heritage. As writers, they will read briefly from their works and also share ideas on how authors express their heritage and why language and labels matter.

Time: Friday, October 29, 2021, at 7 – 8:30 P.M. Eastern Time

Language: English

Cost: Free

Online Zoom meeting.  Please click below link to register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsd-mhrTgsHtV-l7C-UyzUIelufUiaFS2_

Room will open at 6:45 P.M.

For inquiries, please email at info@eawlc.org.

About the Writers

Antonia Facciponte is an author and an MA Candidate at the University of Toronto. Her poetry has been published in various prominent literary magazines, including Exile: The Literary Quarterly, The Northern Appeal, Libretto Magazine, and ACTA Victoriana. Antonia’s first book of poetry, To Make a Bridge, was recently published by Black Moss Press.

Francesco Loriggio was born in a small town in Calabria, one of Italy’s southern regions, and migrated to Vancouver with his family in the mid-1950s. He studied at UBC and received his PhD from UCLA. He taught at the State University of New York (Albany campus) and then at Carleton University, from which he retired, as Professor Emeritus, in 2008. As a scholar, essayist and translator, he has published extensively in a variety of journals and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Italy, edited essay collections, and published translations in both Italian and English.

He is a past president of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies (now the Canadian Association for Italian Studies). In the Italian community of Ottawa, where he has lived for most of his life, he has served, in various capacities, in the National Congress of Italian Canadians and in the Dante Alighieri Society.

Giovanna Riccio is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she majored in philosophy.  Her love of poetry is her inheritance from a gifted, autodidact father who penned his own verses. She is the author of Vittorio (Lyricalmyrical Press, 2010), Strong Bread (Quattro Books, 2011), and Plastic’s Republic (Guernica Editions, 2019), and her poems have appeared in national and international publications and numerous anthologies. Her work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and Romanian. Giovanna is the 2021 winner of the Venera Fazio Poetry Prize.

giovannariccio.com

Everyone is welcome to this fascinating panel discussion. Bring your own questions, and have a dialogue with our guests!