About

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          Anna Monardo was born in Pittsburgh, spent many years in New York City, and now lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she teaches in the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her novels—The Courtyard of Dreams and Falling In Love with Natassia—were published by Doubleday. Her memoir exploring her family’s immigration from southern Italy won Creative Nonfiction's Writing Pittsburgh Contest. Excerpts have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Ovunque Siamo, Hotel Amerika, More, and Cimarron Review.

         Anna’s first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams, was translated into German, Norwegian and Danish; nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award; recommended for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and has been adapted as a classroom text at numerous universities and high schools. The Prologue, “In the Courtyard of the Five Giulias,” was featured on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts” reading series.

         Excerpts from Falling In Love with Natassia first appeared in Prairie Schooner and were awarded a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship for Fiction. Anna is also a recipient of a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction; the Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity at the

University of Nebraska at Omaha; and residency fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation,  Corporation of Yaddo,  and  Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published in The Sun, Fourth Genre, Indiana Review, Poets  and Writers, Salon.com, Huffington Post, and other magazines and journals. Her work has also been anthologized in The Dream Book Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women, Five Years of Fourth Genre, and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers.