Mary Jo Bona

Mary Jo Bona is an American literary scholar who has written extensively on Italian-American literature and its history. She is professor of Italian American Studies and chair of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University.^[1]

Mary Jo Bona
Born	Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Education	Ph.D., American literature
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin

Bona was born in Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of Wisconsin.^[2] After serving for several years as an associate English professor and chair of the Women's Studies department at Gonzaga University,^{[3][self-published source]} she received a stipendiary award and admission to the Academy of Teacher Scholars at Stony Brook.^[1]

She has authored and edited several scholarly works, including The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction (1993). Critic Kenneth Scambray calls The Voices We Carry "a significant contribution to Italian American and women's studies";^[4] Fred Gardaphé calls the anthology "a major step in the development of Italian/American literature";^[2] and Anthony Tamburri writes that the anthology "blazed a trail."^[5] Bona's reviews, articles, and poetry have appeared in American Literary History, Italian Americana, MELUS, NWSA Journal, The Women's Review of Books, and other journals. She published a volume of poems, I Stop Waiting for You, in 2014.^[6]

Bona first became interested in Italian-American women's literature in the late 1980s after reading Helen Barolini's influential anthology, The Dream Book.^[3][7] She formerly served as president of the Italian American Studies Association, and served on the board of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) for six years.^[1]

Books

Author:

• Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary (2016)
• I Stop Waiting for You: Poems (2014)
• By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010)
• Italian American Literature (2003)
• Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1989)

Editor:

• Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (2006)
• Italian Americans and the Arts & Culture (2005)
• Through the Looking Glass: Italian & Italian/American Images in the Media (1996)
• The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction (1993)

Contributor:

• "Afterword," The Right Thing to Do by Josephine Gattuso Hendin (1999)
• Taking Parts: Ingredients for Leadership, Participation, and Empowerment (1993)