FINALIST – 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category, presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation A 1960s Bronx tomboy learns how to survive her brutal but humorous Italian family and all the rest that life throws her. The harder you hit the pavement, the higher you fly. This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father’s lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City’s gay club scene of the ’80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul. “…a truly inspirational story that takes us beyond gender, beyond sexual persuasion, and into the humanity that defines us all … Annie’s is a liberating story, not only in what happens to her, but in the way she tells it … L Is for Lion is an extraordinary telling of ordinary experiences in the life of a Bronx Butch.” — Fra Noi “You need to read this book because it’s the most powerful depiction I have ever read of how a human being can draw on her folk culture, her humor, and her poetic insight to pull life-affirming meaning out of the gutter like a lost spaldeen … L Is for Lion is a luscious lasagna pulled from the hot stove that binds us together as human beings.” — Steve Zeitlin, City Lore “Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is a vividly talented writer whose coming of age story as a Bronx Italian lesbian creates a superb memoir. Rollicking with detail, poetic in language L Is for Lion is the book you read while walking through the house or out to your mailbox, just not wanting to pause even a moment.” — San Francisco Book Review “This sprawling narrative could be called an Italian memoir, a Bronx memoir, a cancer memoir, a veteran father memoir, a 1960s childhood memoir, a mother-daughter memoir, or a lesbian memoir. In an ambitious display of storytelling, Lanzillotto’s charming collection of vignettes encompasses all of these identities at once … L Is for Lion comes across like a bright, entertaining friend who tells the best stories—the kind you never forget.” — Lambda Literary

L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY series in Italian/American Culture)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele

Community & Culture

Excelsior Editions

Poetry. LGBT Studies. An urban songline of New York. From the author of the memoir L is for Lion, comes a panegyric of the geology of Manhattan. These poems glitter. Manhattan schist is rendered as a template for the skyline and characters of New York. Grit and stardust collide in this debut collection of poetry and song. The book begins with the bright reflective quality of Mica and ends with the gentrified vision of the city where "New York is nine millions doors, and you have not one key." In between are stories of urban icons: iceman, fish peddler, heart butcher, meter maid, San Gennaro, the magic of grandmothers' hands, the vision of the oldest living tree in the city, immigrants who fell out windows and died in explosions, Italian phrases that link the essence of the sun to a rose to a heart, crushed tomatoes, sunsets, supermarkets, the glory of hot tar, the lessons of marines and lesbians. You will learn history and geology, Italian American heroes, and spiritual imperatives, through the syllables of this one poet's soul.

Schistsong (VIA Folios)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Bordighera Press

A poetic tarantella of the heart. Walk, tremble and fall in the Matriamia, cry for connection from alleyways up to open windows. Expose your heart. Know what it is to feel "like an errant puzzle piece... never to be found, never to be put into place." A New Yorker learns to walk on Sanpietrini, connects with gay community in the Matriamia, finds living cousins by hanging out in the village cemetery, talks to a Saint who sees ecstasy in stirring fava beans, learns of the Duchess who bit off the saint's finger, argues with Pulcinella, envisions the epic journey of a painting of La Madonna through four seas to get from Constantinople to Acquaviva delle Fonti, sells wind to sailors, avoids draughts, tangos Sciroccazzo, builds a bridge of hearts and asks the question: "What position do you want to be in for l'eternità?" Literary Nonfiction. Film. LGBTQ+ Studies. Women's Studies. Italian Studies.

Whaddyacall the Wind? (VIA Folios)

Arts & Literature

Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw is a flip book with two poetry collections facing each other. In Hard Candy Annie Lanzillotto offers poems and prose of caregiving and mourning in the relationship between the poet and her mother. Pitch Roll Yaw is organized into fourteen stations each beginning with a See, Saw poem -- one line of two phrases separated by a fulcrum: comma, caesura, spondee, dash, or backslash, with a quick shift in weight and change in meaning. Each station is unified by theme or form.

Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica World Editions)

Guernica World Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY series in Italian/American Culture)

Schistsong (VIA Folios)

Whaddyacall the Wind? (VIA Folios)

Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica World Editions)