About
Catherine Marenghi is the author of Unfurled:Love Poems (2023); Our Good Name (2022), an historic fiction based on her Italian immigrant grandparents; Breaking Bread: Poems (2020); and Glad Farm: A Memoir (2016), the story of her childhood on a former gladiolus farm. President Jimmy Carter called her memoir "inspiring." The acclaimed poets Richard Blanco and Jennifer Clement separately selected her poems as first-place winners in two poetry contests sponsored by Crossroads Magazine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems also twice received first-place honors from the Academy of American Poets university prize program. Her work has appeared in literary journals worldwide. She has served on the board of the San Miguel Poetry Café and also co-founded Poetry Mesa, an international poetry community. She holds an M.A., B.A. in English from Tufts University, where she studied with Denise Levertov and X.J. Kennedy. A native of Massachusetts, she currently divides her time between Mexico and Cape Cod.
Featured Work
Our Good Name
Our Good Name is the story of Italian immigrants who leave behind their beloved Apennine village in the 1890s to find their place in a strange new country. From their squalid transatlantic voyage to the shock of Ellis Island to the gritty factory town of Milford, Massachusetts, it is a tale of hardship and heart-wrenching losses at a time of tectonic social upheaval, including deadly labor union strikes, intense anti-immigrant sentiment, and the trial of their neighbor Nicola Sacco. This engaging historical novel reveals a rarely told side of the Italian-American experience, and the courage required to make a home in the New World.
