A Biographical Bibliographical Note on Daniela Gioseffi:

 

Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Her first book, Eggs in the Lake (BOA Editions: Rochester, NY) won a New York State Council for the Arts grant award in poetry. She has also had a NYSCA grant for performance poetry and reads widely throughout the USA and Europe, often appearing on NPR or WNYC as well as other radio and TV stations. She recently taped an interview and reading of her work for The Poet and The Poem, Library of Congress Radio Show,  which will air around the country on various NPR affiliates in Feb. 2006. Her second and third collections, Word Wounds and Water Flowers, and Going On were published by VIA Folios; Symbiosis, poems 2002, was from Rattapallax, NY. Her 2006 collection of New & Selected Poems: Blood Autumn, will appear from VIA Folios/ Bordighera Press @ Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, in an bilingual English/Italian edition, translated by 5 fine Italian poets. Daniela’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Chelsea, Antaeus, The Nation, Priarie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Descant (Canada) Ambit (England) and Poetry East among many magazines and several e-zines, and received three Pushcart Prize Nominations.

 

Though an independent voice on the American poetry scene for over 35 years, she has received excellent reviews for her poetry in varied venues and from accomplished poets of different schools and styles of  poetry, i.e. Stanely Kunitz and William Meredith who offered praise and put her among the finalists for the Yale Series in the early 1970’s; Muriel Rukeyser, who complimented her as a finalist for the Pitt Poetry Series; Nona Balakian, formerly of The New York Times Book Review,  for whom the NBCC Reviewer’s Award is named, called her “one of the best new poets around” in 1979 when her first collection appeared. Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, D. Nurkse, Leo Connellan, Milton Kessler, Bob Holman, Philip Appleman, John Logan, Donna Masini, and Nina Cassian are among others who have written glowing reviews or blurbs of her work. Her interviews with accomplished poets are also widely published in major venues.

 

Daniela’s American Book Award winning anthology WOMEN ON WAR: International Writings, originally a Touchstone/Simon & Schuster publication was reissued in an all new edition by The Feminist Press, NY, 2003, and has received glowing reviews, especially for her 30 pp. Introduction to the varied texts she collected from around the world. Daniela edits www.PoetsUSA.com/ and has published literary criticism in varied venues, such as, Hungry Mind Review, Poet Lore, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, The Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as VIA. Her verse was etched in marble alongside that of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman on the wall of the 7th Avenue Concourse of PENN Station, 2002. Her anthology of world literature, ON PREJUDICE; A Global Perspective, from Anchor/Doubleday, NY, 1993, presented at the United Nations, received a World Peace Award award from The Ploughshares Foundation. She began her career as an intern journalists on WSLA-TV in Alabama in 1961 when she abused by the KKK for her Civil Rights work with Freedom Riders.

 

Gioseffi  is also a fiction writer, the author of a novel from Doubleday The Great American Belly, optioned for a screen play by Warner Bros, and published in London and Zagreb; and a collection of stories, In Bed with the Exotic Enemy, containing work which received the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, 1995. She has published several translations of Latin American poets, including Dust Disappears, poems of Carilda Oliver Labra (CCC, Merrick, NY) with a foreword by Gregory Rabassa. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Italian American Educators in 2003 for her many years of teaching and publishing Creative Writing. Daniela created the first Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk, as a multimedia artist with the Creative Artists Public Service program of the New York State Council for the Arts in 1972. And she had several off-off Broadway plays produced in Manhattan that won award grants from that organization, also. She has an MFA in Classical Drama and has worked as an Equity Actress, a professional jazz singer, and a painter, gourmet cook, and gardener as well as a mother and grandmother.

 

Daniela Gioseffi is registered with the Dickinson Scholars Registry and is currently completing an historical, biographical novel based on new discoveries about America’s best known poet. The afterward is excerpted here.