L Is for Lion

Klappentext Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category presented by the Lambda Literary FoundationThis vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father's lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City's gay club scene of the '80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.

Auteur

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is a Bronx born poet, performance-artist, author, playwright, actor, director, songwriter, activist, cantastoria, whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic. Her work is inspired by the cacophonous opera of pushcart peddler street cries, the roots of theater in the agora, and the solo cantastoria in the piazza. She incorporates and puts metaphoric spins on iconic urban objects: the blue street corner mailbox, Spaldeens, the parking meter, traffic lights, block ice, casts of sewer caps. You can listen to her raw Bronx roar in Annie's Story Cave podcast, and her audiobooks on Audible.com. Visit AnnieLanzillotto.com, StreetCryInc.org.Lanzillotto is the author of the books Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press), Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning and Stage Light, and Pitch, Roll, Yaw (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (SUNY Press, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press). She hosts the talk show Tell Me a Story, (CityLore, StreetCry). Albums include: Never Argue with a Jackass, Swampjuice: Yankee with a Southern Peasant Soul, Blue Pill, Carry My Coffee. Plays and performance works include: Zerega Blues (Bronx Museum of the Arts), Feed Time (Dixon Place, City Lore), A Stickball Memoir (Smithsonian Folklife Festival), Confessions of a Bronx Tomboy: My Throwing Arm, This Useless Expertise (Under One Roof, Manhattan Class Company), La Scarpetta (Guggenheim Museum), a'Schapett! at The Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx, (Dancing in the Streets OnSite/NYC; Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, Puffin Fund), The Flat Earth: Wheredddafffhuck Did New York Go? (Dixon Place Mondo Cane Commission), How to Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole (The Kitchen), Pocketing Garlic (Franklin Furnace), The Hooking Place (Theatre 68), Lasagna Superstar, a musical (St. Ann's Church). Internationally she's performed readings at Napoli Città Libro, Fondazione Sassi-Matera, Sicilia Queer FilmFest-Palermo, Associazione Lette di Sera-Potenza. Lanzillotto was a founding board member of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and conceived of the 146 Shirtwaist Kites, which grew into a coalition-wide community art project emblematic of the fallen sweatshop workers of 1911.Lanzillotto has garnered fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in Non-Fiction Writing, and Multi-Disciplinary Performance, the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership program, and commissions and grants from Dancing in the Streets, Franklin Furnace, Dixon Place, Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund, and Puffin Foundation. Her poetry was awarded the Henry & Anne Paolucci Award from the Italian American Writers' Association, the Allen Ginsberg Award from The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, and the John & Rose Petracca Award from Philadelphia Poets. She's had writing residencies at New Jersey City University, Hedgebrook, and Santa Fe Arts Institute.

Texte du rabat

A 1960s Bronx tomboy learns how to survive her brutal but humorous Italian family and all the rest that life throws her. The harder you hit the pavement, the higher you fly.