Best Books to Read for Intermediate Italian Language Learners - with Author Interview!
Dreaming in Sicilian
It begins with a house...
We are two married writers, Marco and Camellia, who always dreamed of buying a house in Sicily "someday." But a family loss during the pandemic taught us that someday may never come. So we bought a house—over the internet—in the hillside Sicilian village, Melilli, where Marco's father grew up. Now, we're starting our adventures in Sicily.
About Us
Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist and writer for tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a cocurator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York and Melilli, Sicily. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Literary Hub, and Italian America magazine. His debut novel, How Fires End, was a 2020 Connecticut Book Awards finalist and honorable mention and won the 2021 Italian American Studies Association Book Award.
Camellia Phillips' middle grade novel manuscript, Rat, Jack, and the Impossible Job, recently won the inaugural Scribbler Manuscript Contest and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest. She holds an MFA from The New School and is part of the OhMGs and MGnesium middle grade writers groups. She is also a longtime grant writer and leader with social justice organizations and was selected as a 2019 92Y Women inPower Fellow, a program for rising women leaders in New York City. Born and raised in Washington State, she resides in Brooklyn, NY, and Melilli, Sicily.