Laura Valeri

Laura Valeri was born in Piombino, Italy. Her family emigrated to the US in 1978, at the height of Italy's "Years of Lead" when the country was in the grip of the terrorist Red Brigades. Her father was hired as a pharmaceutical sales consultant from Pfizer in New York, and that is where Laura spent her formative years until she graduated from New York University's undergraduate program.

Laura then moved to Miami, the "home of her heart," and completed an MFA in creative writing with Florida International University.She earned her second MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her debut collection of short stories, The Kinds of Things Saints Do, won the John Simmons Award and was published while she was still completing her studies at Iowa.

Laura Valeri moved to Savannah, Georgia in 2003, where she has been living since. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Pedagogy at Georgia Southern University, and founded the literary journal Wraparound South with a mission to disrupt and expand perceptions of the contemporary South through literature. She considers herself both a chronicler of Italian American life and of diverse populations of the American South. She also translates work from her native Italian.

Valeri likes to write about the effects of violence, displacement, and war on women, and about the universal concerns of Otherness, focusing on the loneliness and alienation that arises out of various forms of prejudice and exclusion. Her work has often been praised for its lyricism, emotional poignance, and incisive observations of human behavior.

You can learn more about the author on www.lauravaleri.com