Anthony Di Renzo, a fugitive from advertising, teaches writing at Ithaca College. His previous books include Bitter Greens; Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen (State University of New York Press, 2010), Trinàcria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily (Guernica Editions, 2013), and Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America (State University of New York Press, 2016), cowritten with Andrei Guruianu. These works satirize the ongoing culture war between Italian humanism and American capitalism. Italy usually loses.
A scholar of twentieth-century American literature, Di Renzo also has published two critical studies: American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993) and If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). As Pasquino, Rome’s talking statue, he contributed monthly humor columns to L’Italo Americano between 2013 and 2020.
He lives in Ithaca, New York: an Old World man in a New Age town.
Cayuga Lake Books 