Author, journalist, critic
I am an author, journalist, and critic living in New York City. I have contributed features, reviews, essays, and opinion pieces to a wide range of print and digital publications. My ruling passions are culture and the arts (especially music, movies, and theater), politics, social science, social and political theory. I have written about all these topics, for such publications as The Nation, Film Comment, Newsday, Gay City News, The Advocate, Cineaste, In These Times, The Italian American Review and Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. I also am a contributor to the online publications PopMatters, The New York Journal of Books, Rootsworld, La Voce di New York and I-Italy.
My well-reviewed first book , An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America explores some of my longstanding preoccupations as a writer: cultural mythologies and their social impact; ethnic identity and stereotypes; popular culture, especially film, and how such social categories as race, class, sexuality and gender interact in American society. I am a contributing author to many other books, including The Routledge History of the Italian Americans; The Essential Sopranos Reader (University of Kentucky Presses); Mafia Movies: A Reader (University of Toronto); Our Naked Lives (Bordighera Press); Witness to Revolution: The Advocate Reports on Gay and Lesbian Politics, 1967 - 1999 (Alyson); Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema (City University of New York); and Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub (Schirmer Ltd.).
I am a public speaker/conference presenter as well as a media consultant. I have spoken at conferences in the US and abroad, on ethnicity and immigration, film, music, and literature. I have been a consultant to, and onscreen presence in, several documentaries, including "The Italian Americans " (PBS, 2015); The Godfather Legacy (History Channel, 2013), and "Beyond Wiseguys" (PBS, 2008).
As an Italian translator, I contributed to Italoamericana (Fordham University Press), a major volume of historical scholarship.
Agents and publishers -- if my work and areas of expertise interest you, please get in touch via this website.