Vincent Panella

Vincent Panella grew up in Queens, New York and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School with the intention of becoming an engineer in the age of Sputnik. Doses of Homer, Whitman and too many writers to mention here cut short his engineering career and he went on to study literature and then fiction writing at the Iowa Workshop. He worked for a short time in Dubuque Iowa as a reporter for the Telegraph Herald, all the while continuing to write fiction. He has taught writing of all kinds, and for several years he served as the Writing Specialist at Vermont Law School. He is the author of the memoir The Other Side, Growing up Italian in America, and the novel Cutter's Island, which won a ForeWord fiction award. Of his short story collection, Lost Hearts, one review said it "...calls to be included in every Italian-American's library." Of his latest novel, Sicilian Dreams, set in 1907, one review said "..the volume calls to mind the work of 20th-century Italian novelists like Cesare Pavese and Leonardo Sciascia, wherein the convictions of a moral man are tested by an invariably amoral environment.