Emilio DeGrazia
Read DeGrazia's presentation and view the illustrations by clicking here: Poles Together.
Emilio DeGrazia, Professor Emeritus at Winona State University, taught English there from 1969 until his retirement in 2002. His scholarly interests centered mainly on British and American romanticism and classical mythology, but creative writing was important to his teaching career. He has written pieces about Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ole Rolvaag, Emily Bronte, and others, and began publishing poetry and creative prose in 1973. In 1977 he founded Great River Review, a literary journal currently published by the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. A first collection of short fiction, Enemy Country (New Rivers, 1984), was selected by Anne Tyler for a Writer’s Choice Award, and a novel, Billy Brazil (New Rivers, 1991), was chosen for a Minnesota Voices Project award. A second collection, Seventeen Grams of Soul (Lone Oak Press), received a Minnesota Book Award in 1995, and Lone Oak published a second novel, A Canticle for Bread and Stones, in 1996. In June, 2002, a two-act drama Winona: A Romantic Tragedy was published and produced.
He and his wife Monica also have co-edited two anthologies for Nodin Press of Minneapolis, Twenty-Six Minnesota Writers (1995) and Thirty-Three Minnesota Poets (2000), both of them Minnesota Book Award finalists. In 2002 Emilio and Monica co-edited a poetry collection by Jack Lucas entitled It Came to Pass. Burying the Tree, published by Plain View Press of Austin, Texas (2010), is his first collection of creative prose, and Seasonings (Nodin, 2012) his first collection of poetry. In 2012 he was appointed to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of Winona.