News & Events
Professor Guida Debuts Poetry Collection
Low Italian: Poems, the debut collection by New York City College of Technology (City Tech) English Professsor George Guida, has recently been published by Bordighera Press in New York.
A finalist for the Bordighera Poetry Prize, Low Italian portrays the comedy and tragedy of ethnic consciousness in America.
“‘I’m through being Italian,’ announces the title of the first poem in this book. Those of us who are not through with it will get a headache from all the nods of recognition that George Guida’s sharp and surprising poems will provoke, as they move from bitter irony to lyrical tenderness and back again," says Michael Palma, author of A Fortune in Gold, translator of Dante’s Inferno and poetry editor of Italian Americana. "Those who never were Italian will be given a rare insight into what it feels like. And everyone will have a high time with Low Italian.”
Adds John Paul Russo, author of The Future Without a Past, director of graduate studies at the University of Miami and book review editor of Italian Americana, “Guida is a comic genius who is writing some of the funniest, most successfully satiric poems about Italian American behavior and culture, and by extension, ethnicity in general. His work has the self-assurance of a master…."
Dr. Guida’s other publications include the chapbook, The Pope Stories (The Sutton Press, 2005), and a book of critical essays, The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (Lang, 2003).
His writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Hurricane Blues, Inkwell, The Paterson Literary Review, Poetry New York, The Columbia Journal of American Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Italian Americana, and other journals and collections. He has just completed a new collection of poems, and is currently working on a novel set partially in Upstate New York and on an expanded collection of Pope Stories.
A performer as well as a college professor and poet, Dr. Guida co-founded and co-hosts the Intercollegiate Poetry Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club. He also emcees a poetry slam at City Tech. Formerly coordinator of the College's Writing Across the Curriculum initiative, he is now director of its Coordinated Undergraduate Education. In the latter role, he oversees the development and operation of a new Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, and will coordinate the efforts of various special academic programs.
Dr. Guida lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Cohocton in Western New York State. Visit his Web site at www.georgeguida.com.
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Three excerpts from Low Italian (indents by the author)
2.7.07
