Honored to Begin Writing for the Italian American Herald

What Italian-American women carry across generations — and what it costs to finally ask why.

I’m honored and genuinely excited to share my first piece as a regular contributor to the Italian American Herald.

Local and diaspora papers like this matter. They hold space for our cultural memory, our arguments, our celebrations, and our reckonings. They give shape to conversations that might otherwise remain private or disappear entirely.

In this review of Jo Piazza’s The Sicilian Inheritance, I explore what it means to inherit not just land or stories, but temperament, silence, and the emotional architecture shaped by women whose choices were never fully recorded. This is not inheritance as nostalgia, but inheritance as temperament, survival, and unfinished conversation.

The novel understands something many Italian Americans feel but rarely articulate: that the real story began before us, somewhere else, and what we carry is only a fragment. A gesture. A rumor. Half a sentence.

For those who follow my work on Italian-American memory, women’s lives, and ancestral inheritance, this piece sits squarely in that terrain.

You can read the full review here:

The Sicilian Inheritance Review

This is part of the ongoing work of Olive on the Apple Tree — holding both the news of the diaspora and the deeper work of memory and inheritance. If you or

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