Writer’s BiographyWhen I am Italian: quando sono italiana, (2019), Joanna Clapps Herman’s most recent publication, explores the question of whether it’s possible to be Italian if you weren’t born in Italy. Her fiction collection No Longer and Not Yet (2014), is about the intimacies of everyday life on The Upper West Side of Manhattan. A memoir, The Anarchist Bastard (2011) which begins, “I often say that I was born in 1944 but raised in the 15th Century because although I was born in Waterbury, CT, in a New England factory town, in post-WWII, I grew up in a large southern Italian family where the rules were absolute, and customs antiquated.” She is co-editor of two anthologies Wild Dreams (2008) and Our Roots Are Deep with Passion (2006). She has published widely in literary journals as a poet, a fiction writer and an essayist.
BiographyBorn in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1944, I grew up in a large extended Italian family. We didn’t call ourselves Italian American and I still find it hard to call myself that. I am the second daughter of a second daughter. I am a younger sister, of a two child family. I was the difficult child. I’m the daughter of Rose Becce Clapps (Rosa Becce) and Peter Clapps (Pietro Claps), (yes, Claps, Clapps is a southern Italian name) sister to Lucia Mudd. I am a proud mother of James Paul Herman a neuroscientist, who is married to the strong, smart beautiful Jordan Pearlstein: she works in community development. I am the widow of my beloved Dr. William Herman, a professor of literature at City College, and the stepmother of Donna Ann Herman and Lisa Jane Herman. I was a teacher and professor for 51 years, teaching at every level: nursery school, elementary school, middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate school. I think this gives me some insight into human nature and development. Teaching was as much a part of my artistic life as reading and writing. Perhaps though I learned more about human behavior in my very large, extended Italian family where we lived in each other’s days and nights. There I also learned to do, fix and make, to cook, to sew, to take care of things, to love and to navigate the complexities of power and hierarchies. It was a fine school. My close family and larger extended family are wildly important to me.
