American Poet, novelist, essayist, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s most recent book Silence and Silences, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, was described as “not just about courage but about the courage of clarity itself, that life-long ability to descend into silence and find the ways to unlock or use it, especially in times of grief..”
This writer has lived in Parma, Italy for more than forty years, and earlier still in Rome, Oxford, England, Palo Alto, California, New York City, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. A life in two languages, two cultures--one highly individualistic and historically capitalistic, the other ancient and proposing various histories of collectivities, Empires, religious states, monarchies, dictatorships, foreign occupations--plunged her into the unendingly challenging sea of difference and differences. The reality of bringing body and mind into focus gifted her the need for new language, perspectives, ways of empathizing. It pulled her out of popular narrations and propelled her into unexplored ground. Reading her work has been described as "like discovering a phosphorescent-rich sea, still unnamed, waiting.”
Her subject has never deviated from a central passion: finding one’s voice as a woman and lifting it. She published Mother Tongue, An American Life in Italy; The Other Side of the Tiber, Reflections of Life in Italy, Silence and Silences, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NYC. Toscanelli’s Ray, a novel, was published by Cadmus Editions, SF. Her essays and translations have won awards and been anthologized in Best Spiritual Essays, Granta, Major Ideas of the Twentieth Century. A collection of her work has been published in Italian: L’oceano e’ dentro di noi, Moretti e Vitali.
Forty years of instructing writers from more than thirty countries in Geneva, Switzerland, foreign priests in Rome, doctors from Mayo clinic, orphans in Sri Lanka, illegal immigrants in Parma, night students at Sarah Lawrence, masters students at Columbia University—she finds the power of telling stories, listening and witnessing are critical ways to break down barriers or surmount them, and thus be alive in the world.
More information about her work can be found at https://www.Walliswilde-menozzi.com
