In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of family—Louise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named “the drunk” because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri’s account of a summer vacation séance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy.

Lee Gutkind, founding editor of Creative Nonfiction, the nation’s premier nonfiction prose literary journal, and Joanna Clapps Herman have brought together artful essays by novelists, scholars, critics, and memoirists from across the country. The pieces are as varied as their authors, but all explore the unique intersections of language, tradition, cuisine, and culture that characterize the diverse experience of Americans of Italian heritage.

For more than thirty years, the journal Italian Americana has been home to the writers who have sparked an extraordinary literary explosion in Italian-American culture. Across twenty-five volumes, its poets, memoirists, story-tellers, and other voices bridged generations to forge a brilliant body of expressive works that help define an Italian-American imagination.

Wild Dreams offers the very best from those pages: sixty-three pieces—fiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interview—that range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant culture’s coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of America’s best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art?

Organized by provocative themes—Ancestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Self—the selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature. From John Fante’s “My Father’s God,” his classic story of religious subversion and memoirs by Dennis Barone and Jerre Mangione to a brace of poets, selected by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, ranging from John Ciardi, Jay Parini, and Mary Jo Salter to George Guida and Rachel Guido de Vries.

There are also stories alive with the Italian folk tradition (Tony Ardizzone and Louisa Ermelino), and others sleekly experimental (Mary Caponegro, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson). Other pieces— including an unforgettable interview with Camille Paglia—are Italian-American takes on the culture at large.

Joanna Clapps Herman's work has also appeared in the following anthologies:
• "Stitching Our Voices Together," Embroidered Lines and Cut Threads: Women’s Domestic Needlework in the Italian Diaspora, Edited by Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra, University of Mississippi Press. Forthcoming.
• "My Aboriginal Women," Lavanderia: Wash, Women and Word. Sunbelt Publications, Fall 2009. Winner of the 16th Annual San Diego Book Awards Association for Best Anthology.
• "My Homer," Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans, Ed. Dr. Luisa Del Giudice, Palgrave, October 2009.
• "Papone," in Don't Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. Edited by Regina Barreca. Penguin, 2002.
• "Coffee And," The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. Edited by Edvige Guinta and Louise DeSalvo. Feminist Press, 2002.