Helen Barolini

Bio

(1925-2023) Novelist, essayist, poet. Helen Barolini was born and grew up in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from Syracuse University. She did work at the University of London and traveled in Europe as a special columnist for the Syracuse Herald-Journal. In Italy she met and married fellow journalist and writer, Antonio Barolini. During her residence in Italy, she translated Italian authors, wrote a radio-drama on the nineteenth century American feminist and newspaper correspondent, Margaret Fuller, and received a prize for literary journalism. Helen Barolini received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in creative writing that led to the completion of her first novel, Umbertina, recently re-issued by the Feminist Press and now published in an Italian edition. She authored eleven other books that have been published. Many of her stories and essays have appeared in journals, collections, and anthologies. She has been cited in Best American Essays for 1991, 1993, and 1999; and “How I Learned to Speak Italian” is included in Best American Essays 1998. Cross-cultural themes are a strong part of her work both in fiction and non-fiction as well as her emphasis on the ongoing search for self-definition. She has received the MELUS 2000 award for her contribution to the multi-cultural literature of the United States, and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.