Poet Anne McCrary Sullivan discusses her latest book Learning Calabar, Notes from a Poet’s Year in Nigeria with editor Michelle Reale.
JoinedMarch 16, 2022
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Dr. Michelle Reale is a professor at Arcadia University. She is the author of seven monographs in her field of library science. She is an Italian-American poet and the author of numerous collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019), Blood Memory (Idea Press, 2020), and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily (Cervena Barva Press, 2021). In her creative and autoethnogrpahic work, Dr. Reale troubles various aspects of Italian-American culture and the Italian-American experience such as immigration history, narrative inheritance, inherited trauma, organized crime, damaging stereotypes, and the pervasive mythologization of the culture in general. Her ethnography in Sicily and her work with refugees there sought, and continues to seek, to excavate firsthand accounts of the lived experiences of those who left their homes for freedom and safety.
"Autoethnography and culture: Embodied inquiry is not a formula, or methodology, but a way of being, being open to the body as a source of knowledge, wonder, difficulty, fragility and utter joy."
Autoethnographic Literary Nonfiction: I Just Want to Go Home – Moving, Loss and Unacknowledged Grief
"Moving away from a beloved home at a tender age was traumatizing, in part, because that home was the only place in which I felt safe."
