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Dispatches from Lesbian America

An anthology of stories by lesbian authors

Hey Paesan!

Hey Paesan!
Out of print, available used on Amazon.
  • Publisher: Three Guineas Press
  • Editor: Giovanna Capone, Denise Nico Leto, Tommi Avicolli Mecca
  • Available in: Paperback
  • ISBN: 0967558603
  • Published: December 1, 1999
Available used on Amazon.com

Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent

Edited by Giovanna (Janet) Capone, Denise Nico Leto, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca

An anthology of writing by Italian/Sicilian-descended lesbians and gay men in North America, Hey Paesan! is the first-ever look at the homophobia, silence and invisibility faced by members of an ethnic group that have been stereotyped as mafiosi and femme fatales. It’s a long overdue contribution to the growing awareness about multiculturalism in the Americas. It’s also queer pride, Italian style!

Praise from a reader:

As a lesbian Italian American I yearn to find myself in today’s whitebread Anglo-centric culture. Hey Paesan! is an anthology of essays from L/G Italian Americans that serves as that reflecting pool. By deconstructing identities through poems and memoirs, the authors describe what it’s like being a queer paesan! Molto bene!”

— Stephanie Bonvissuto

Giovanna Capone is a poet, fiction writer, and playwright. She was raised in an Italian American neighborhood in New York. Her work has appeared in Curaggia: Writing by Women of Italian Descent, Bless Me Father: Stories of Catholic Childhood, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, and many more. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works as a public librarian.

Denise Nico Leto is a San Francisco Bay Are poet, writer, and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including: Curaggia: Writing By Women of Italian Descent, My Lover is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems, and the Chiron Literary Review. Denise has completed her first poetry manuscript and is working on a collection of essays on voice.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca: I started writing when I was ten. I hammered out plays on an old Underwood typewriter that my mother had in her bedroom. As a teen, I published poems in the South Philly Review Chronicle. At Temple University, I won the Young Poets contest for a poem I wrote about a high school classmate I was in love with. Since those early days, I have continued to answer the call of my life’s greatest passion: I spent 10 years working for the Philadelphia Gay News as a reporter, then Local News Editor and finally Managing Editor. Arriving in San Francisco in 1991, I wrote for a few years for the SF Bay Times. I published Between Little Rock and a Hard Place in 1993, then co-edited Hey Paesan: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent in 1999. In 2008, I was part of a group of editors that put together Avanti Popolo: Italian Writers Sail Beyond Columbus. This year, I edited Smash the Church, Smash the State: the Early Years of Gay Liberation for City Lights Books, to mark the 40th anniversary of Stonewall and the birth of gay liberation. I write regularly for beyondchron.org and maintain a website with some of my writings: avicollimecca.com. I have always been, and remain, a political activist as well as a writer, fighting for economic justice for all. That means affordable housing, living wage jobs, free public transportation, universal healthcare, and ownership of the means of production by the workers. Avanti popolo!


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