Recently in an interview with Linda Bladholm, I said, It all begins with family and stories around the table—food is love, communion, spirituality, poetry, and our histories are the way we break bread with our ancestors.  That's why food is in my poetry and ficiton ... and yes, non-ficiton too!  

I love writing and reading they pump my blood to lub-dub it through my heart as I learn about life.  I wrote poems growing up in Brooklyn, began my first novel when I was sixteen in Garden City.  But with nothing earth-shattering to say, decided to live life instead and write about it later in novels. 

I come to writing by the circuitous route of teaching middle school P. E., in which I hold a Master's.  Three years after I married, I left teaching.  My husband and I moved to Rome, Italy, lived there twenty years.  I learned Italian, Spanish, and that people don't pay your bills, but that castle-museum-cathedral-hopping and travel pay off for a writer. 

My poems were published often in The Rome Daily American.  I began another novel, but stopped writing because I didn t know enough about craft.  That novel will become the third in a trilogy.  The first two, The Secret Language of Women, set during China's Boxer Rebellion, and Lemon Blossoms, set in Sicily, are finished.  

We moved to Florida from Europe in 1990.  I ve been taking writing courses since 1991 and didn't stop till I'd earned a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University.  I acquired skill and technique about the craft of fiction from my mentor John Dufresne and from Lynne Barrett, and I studied poetry with Campbell McGrath.  My thesis was a collection of short stories, and I've just completed a collection of poems published by Rock Press. 

After graduation I wrote two more novels, one set in the old west, the other in Russia.  I write, revise or read poetry daily mine or anyone's before I write fiction, a habit learned from John Dufresne. 

Hope you enjoy your perusal of this website for excerpts from my novels, and a peek into my collection of poems, Cooking Lessons.  Read about the faith I have in my writing group: Screw Iowa! and about the collaborative book we're writing.

*

More about Nina

For me, stories are an innate part of me. Sicilians are natural born story-tellers and in our history, cantastorie used to travel from town to town and as people gathered in the streets and piazze to listen,these story-singers would bring news in narratives of love, lust, laughter, tears and tragedy.  

My mother told me stories and read me stories not just fairy tales or children's tales she gave me the rhythms and cadence of poetry from The Song of Hiawatha, stoking the flames of a vivid imagination with tales from The Arabian Nights.  My mother and Scheherazade kept me entertained for one thousand and one nights and more.  While my father gave me his youth, recounted and remembered, with the flavors and scents of his world and childhood in Sicily. 

Our family exchanged stories around the kitchen table.  Whether it was my maternal family in Brooklyn where I grew up or later hearing stories from my aunts in Sicily when I moved to Italy and lived in Rome for a twenty year sojourn.  

Many of my short stories have roots in those old tales told to me as a child, or inventions I told my son and nephews.  My stories, poems, and novels are about cooking and food, and how food is communion of both body and soul and how it sustains a family, and loved ones.   When I was about eleven years old, a nun asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I said, Travel.   Although I'm sure my answer disappointed her, I told the truth.  I love travel and have been fortunate in that I have traveled a great deal fodder for more stories.  My writing is about families and relationships, about having children, or wanting children, and even about not wanting children.  I love history, geography, exotic places, different eras and epochs, and ages gone by.  All of this is reflected in my settings such as: China, Sicily, the American West, and Russia, not to mention, Rome, Dublin, Corsica, and Patagonia to name a few.

Three of my short stories have turned into novels.  At least two of which contain some details, reminiscences, or kernels of family history, but also other things I love: language and research.

The inspiration for my novel The Secret Language of Women comes from something my Grandfather said when I was a little girl.  And it is loosely, very, very, loosely based on the fact that he was in the Italian Merchant Marine and fought in the Boxer Rebellion in China. A fertile imagination can take this far and wide and so I did.  For years before I even started writing, I carried around with me a book mark with this quote from Anatole France: To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.   

There is no sweeter taunt than the provoking words tossed out to a child in play: You wouldn't dare.   Oh yes I would.  I dared then, and I dare now, only now I challenge myself to set black on white.  The only way to fully understand the reasons why I write what I write is to turn the pages of my writings and perhaps through the introspective telling of histories, stories, narrative poems, a universal truth will emerge.  At least that's what this writer strives to attain.

Click here to download Nina Romano's resume