The following is a list of Italian-American women writers.
Adriana Trigiani is an American best-selling author of eighteen books, playwright, television writer/producer, film director/screenwriter/producer, and entrepreneur based in New York City. Trigiani has published a novel a year since 2000.
Helen Barolini is an American writer, editor, and translator. As a second-generation Italian American, Barolini often writes on issues of Italian-American identity. Among her notable works are Umbertina (1979), a novel which tells the story of four generations of women in one Italian-American family; and an anthology, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), which called attention to an emerging, and previously unnoticed, class of writers.
Nancy Laura Savoca is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an American poet.
Joanna Clapps Herman is an Italian American writer, editor and poet. She is the author of three books of prose, editor of two anthologies, and her essays and writing have been published in many anthologies and literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Inkwell and The Massachusetts Review.
Paper Fish is a 1980 novel by Antoinette "Tina" De Rosa (1944–2007), published initially by Wine Press and re-published by The Feminist Press in 1996. The novel is set in Little Italy, the Italian community around Taylor Street, in the Near West Side, during the 1940s and the 1950s. Connie Lauerman of the Chicago Tribune described Paper Fish as an "autobiographical novel". The book's main character is Carmolina BellaCasa and the book is centered on her family. The primary relationship in the novel is between the main character and Doria, her grandmother. Other characters include Carmolina's father and mother and her ill older sister.
Agnes Rossi is an American fiction writer.
Mari Tomasi (1907–1965) was an American novelist who portrayed the lives of Italian immigrants in Vermont. Literature professor Thomas J. Ferraro calls her "the first significant Italian American woman novelist." Tomasi also worked as a journalist and local historian, and served a term in the Vermont House of Representatives.
Marion Benasutti was an American writer. The daughter of immigrants from Northern Italy, she was born in Brandy Camp, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Philadelphia. She learned English in school as a child, and never finished high school, yet enjoyed a successful writing career.
Diana Cavallo (1931-2017) was an American novelist, educator, playwright, and performer.
Octavia Waldo is an American writer and artist. She is best known for her 1961 novel, A Cup of the Sun.
Like Lesser Gods is a 1949 novel by Mari Tomasi about the Italian-American stonecutters of Granitetown, and their dedication to the work despite the danger of silicosis. Originally published by Bruce, a small Catholic press, it was republished by the New England Press in 1988 and 1999.
Umbertina (1979) is a feminist novel by Helen Barolini. It tells the story of four generations of women in one Italian-American family. It is the first novel by an Italian-American woman which explores, in depth, the connected themes of gender and ethnicity.
Edvige Giunta is a Sicilian-American writer, educator, and literary critic.
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.
Carol Bonomo Albright is an American author, editor, and educator in the field of Italian-American studies. She has published many books and articles on the subject, and taught classes at the University of Rhode Island and the Harvard University Extension School. She was editor-in-chief of Italian Americana, a peer-reviewed cultural/historical journal, for over 25 years.
Rachel Guido deVries is an American poet and novelist.
Mary Bucci Bush is an American author and a professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Los Angeles.
Sweet Hope (2011), an award-winning historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush, tells the story of Italian immigrants living in peonage on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s. It was inspired by the experiences of Bush's grandmother, Pasquina Fratini Galavotti, who worked on the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas as a child.
Kym L. Ragusa is an American writer and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York.