The Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal, in collaboration with the Association of Italian Canadian Writers (AICW) and ACCENTi, is pleased to present a roundtable discussion on the theme “Love of Roots”.
IIC Director Francesco D’Arelli and Licia Canton, recipient of the Premio Italia nel Mondo 2018 and past-president of the AICW, will host the event with writers Liana Cusmano, Annalisa Panati, Christina Sforza and Giulia Verticchio. Discussion in Italian; readings of poems in Italian, French and English.
Wednesday, February 13 at 6 p.m
Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal
1200 Dr. Penfield Ave.
Montreal, Quebec
Liana Cusmano, born and raised in Montreal, has Venetian and Calabrian roots. A graduate of McGill University, Liana writes short stories, poems and filmscripts. In June 2018 Liana won the Slam poetry contest in Montreal and, in November 2018, competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Guelph, Ontario. Liana’s poems and short stories have been published in the anthologies The Radiance of the Short Story (Universidade de Lisboa, 2018); Influence and Confluence, East and West: A Global Anthology on the Short Story (East China Normal University Press, 2016); and People, Places, Passages (Longbridge Books, 2018), presenting texts in English, French and Italian. Liana wrote the filmscript for La Femme Finale, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, and for the film Matters of Great Unimportance (also directed), presented at the Fiera delle parole in Padua in 2018. Liana’s interviews with Italian-Canadian writers appear at Accenti.
Annalisa Panati is an Italian writer and mathematician. Born in Verona, she moved to France for her doctoral studies and she obtained a positon as Maître de Conférences at Center of Theoretical Physics in Marseille. After spending an extensive period in Canada as visiting professor, she currently lives between Montreal and Marseille. She has published La venditrice di sogni , Ed.Schena, 2008 (The dream seller) which was awarded the Valerio Gentile prize, Storie di donne e di pianura Ed. Schena, 2014 (Stories of women and the Plaine) and the play Vita e sogni di mister Pauli, (Life and Dreams of Mr. Pauli) staged in 2014 in the Teatro e Scienza theatre festival in Turin, Italy.
Christina Angela Sforza was born and raised in Montreal. Her heritage is from the Apulia region in the province of Bari. She is interested in cultural issues, humanitarian causes, topics in psychology and uncovering truths. Christina currently writes for a series of blogs, and is also developing her own collection of creative writing. She aims to resonate with the experiences of young female Italian Canadians by creating a voice for this generation through her writing.
Giulia Verticchio was born and raised in Rome, where she completed a B.A. in History and Geography and an M.A. in Economics and Social History. Thanks to a European academic scholarship she studied in Angers (France) and then moved to Bristol (UK) for a while. She arrived in Canada in 2015, as an intern at the Italian Cultural Institute. She works for CFMB 1280AM radio and for the Cittadino Canadese newspaper. She is currently working on a Masters at UQAM, researching the redevelopment of Montreal theaters. She also worked for the Italian-Canadian Community Foundation and for PICAI. She currently teaches Italian language at UQAM. For the past three years Giulia has volunteered on the editorial board of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers (AICW). She is now the AICW secretary.
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