Piana degli Albanesi
Cannoli, in season
A spring drive made for one purpose: to eat a cannolo within minutes of its making, while the shell still remembers its crispness.
A completed memoir in linked stories
The Last
Time I
A food-anchored memoir of Sicily, immigration, inheritance, and the tastes that carry us home.
Pull up a chair
Palermo · Maryland
and all the miles between
Forty memories · one long table
Podcast & conversations
Stories are meant
to be shared.
I’m beginning to share conversations about food, memory, migration, identity, and the small rituals that help us remember who we are.
As new podcast episodes and conversations are released, you’ll find them here.
The memoir
What we lose to belong.
What memory helps us find again.
The Last Time I begins with food: ricotta still warm from its making, strattu drying in the Sicilian sun, a childhood lunch that announced my difference before even I could understand it.
Across forty linked entries, food opens into stories of language, family, migration, and belonging—a return to traditions and identity once whittled away and ultimately reclaimed.
Rooted in Sicily, this is a love letter to immigrants everywhere who leave home to build a life for those they love. Sicilians may recognize the table first; others may recognize themselves in the journey.
From the table
A taste
of the stories
Three glimpses from a completed memoir manuscript.
A school lunchroom
Cotoletta di pollo
A cotoletta di pollo tucked between bread, pulled from its wrapping among a sea of Wonder Bread—and the awkwardness of being known before I was ready.
Sicily, before dawn
Martorana
On All Souls’ Day, martorana appeared as if left by those who loved us first. We were not frightened. We could hardly wait to wake.
Stay at the table
Bring your own
“last time I…”
The Last Time I is complete and finding its way toward publication. If its stories bring a memory of your own to the surface, I would love to stay connected.
Let’s collaborate
Let’s bring stories of food,
memory, and belonging
to the table.
Book talks · Podcasts · Food-and-memory workshops · Immigrant storytelling · Cultural and community programs