About Nina Romano
I always say that I came to writing via a circuitous route. I have a BS and an MA in Physical Education. After teaching middle school and coaching for five years, I moved to Italy with my husband and began submitting poems to little literary magazines. I have three very early collections published there–and it amazes me now to look at them and see how much I tried, yet how unschooled I was. Despite the fact that I’d never taken a formal course in poetry or creative writing at that time, I managed to publish many over a twenty year sojourn in Rome, and thought I’d like to get a degree in Creative Writing.
Back in the States, along the path to the MFA, I found myself with enough credits to finish a BA in English. I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from FIU, where Dennis Lehane was finishing the program as I was just beginning it. So I guess that makes him older than me! My thesis advisor was John Dufresne, who has since become a friend as well as a mentor. I graduated with a collection of short stories simply because he said it was “time to get the hell out.” I was unable to revise the novel draft, written under John’s tutelage, to use for a thesis because my mother—my best reader— had passed away.
I finally finished Lemon Blossoms, an historical literary novel set in Sicily in the early 1900′s, the following year. My agent at the time had great hopes for the book, but even though editors loved the writing, they were unsure how to market the novel, so it remained unsold, and finally I took it back.
Meanwhile, in 2004, I began writing The Secret Language of Women, which is the prequel to Lemon Blossoms. The manuscript is based on one of my short stories, The Rain, which I then excerpted from the novel and had published in Dim Sum Asia’s Literary Journal. Since then the novel, a story of star-crossed lovers set in China during the Boxer Rebellion, has seen several revisions. The novel is loosely based—I pray he doesn’t turn over in his grave—on the life of my grandfather, an Italian sailor, who was stationed there during this time period and, here’s where fiction plays its part, his love affair with a Eurasian healer. I have visited China and have done extensive research to make sure my writing is authentic.
I have attended many writing conferences, one of them a summer at University of Iowa, where I met my writing group. We then created the Screw Iowa! website and now it5′s incorporated into Bridle Path Press. Our writing group has collaborated first an E-book and now a print copy of Writing in a Changing World.
We have published two other books: Choke Creek, an historical, literary novel by Lauren Small, which is now taught in high schools around the nation, and a mystery novel, The Blue Virgin by MK Graff, the debut in the new Nora Tierney series.
The year 2012 Bridle Path Press will usher in yet another novel in the Nora Tierney series, entitled The Green Remains, and also an elegiac poetry collection: She Wouldn’t sing at My Wedding by Nina Romano.
Since graduating FIU, I have had numerous short stories and poems published and find myself with a collection of each–one I’ve been fortunate enough to find a home for. My short story collection, The Other Side of the Gates, is forthcoming from Kitsune Books in early 2013. The poetry collection is finished and incubating so in the meantime, I’ve started another.
I have taught English and Literature as an adjunct professor for a year at St. Thomas University and have facilitated many poetry workshops. I love teaching workshops because the participants are so eager and enthusiastic, and I also get the bonus of learning from them.
Two of my poetry collections have been published: Cooking Lessons in 2007 by Rock Press and Coffeehouse Meditations in 2010 by Kitsune Books. I have received a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize and two nominations for a Pushcart Prize in poetry.
However, my great hope still remains in publishing a novel. I have a completed draft that has been revised several times but still needs work and I plan on doing just that for the rest of winter right into spring–working on my novel, The Secret Language of Women, during 2012–ever with an eye toward tightening the polt and pacing.
The other thing that I’ll be working on during this next revision is to make sure that research doesn’t sound like a travelogue, and becomes a seamless collage.
My Books
Lush and lyrical, funny and mundane, Nina Romano’s second bound poetry collection is presented in two parts.