about marisa

Marisa Labozzetta was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She was spared the negative connotation of being an only child by a mother who took great pains not to spoil her and by the companionship of many cousins in a closely-knit family. She majored in secondary education and Spanish at Boston College and taught high school for a brief time on Long Island. As a teaching fellow in the Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University, she received a Masters of Science degree and completed her doctoral coursework.  

While Labozzetta was working as an education specialist in the D.C. Office of Bilingual Education, her boss encouraged her to write, and she published her first piece in The Washington Star. She married and relocated to New Mexico, where she became a regular contributor to The Torrance County Citizen, enrolled in creative writing classes at the University of New Mexico, and had babies. She won first prize in the Rio Grande Writers´ fiction contest, and was a finalist in Playboy´s Victoria Chen Haider Memorial Literary Award for Fiction, and in New Letters Literary Awards. After missing too many family weddings and funerals, she and her husband moved back east.

Labozzetta went on to publish stories in the best-selling When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, The American Voice, Show Me a Hero: Great Contemporary Stories About Sports, The Pegasus Review, VIA, KnitLit, Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, Paradise, Our Mothers Our Selves, Beliefnet.com, Italian Americana, Perigee, and American Fiction,among others.

In her first novel, Stay With Me, Lella, a less than conventional choice made early in a conventional marriage tests a couple's notions of love and loyalty in a tale of sex, betrayal and family politics. Kirkus called At the Copa, a funny, finely wrought collection of short stories that stirs up the emotional currents beneath seemingly placid lives of middle-aged characters in “the old age of youth.” Labozzetta received a Pushcart Prize for the collection, and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Award in 2009. "Forecast for a Sunny Day," from that collection, won the Watchung Arts Center Award for Short Fiction in 2010. Her novel, Sometimes It Snows in America, and collection of linked short stories, Thieves Never Steal in the Rain, were Eric Hoffer Award Finalists.

Labozzetta has taught Italian American Studies through literature at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, and fiction writing at Kirtland Community College Controlled Burn. Seminar for Writers. She was guest editor for the special issue of the mdpi journal Religions, dedicated to Critics and Writers on Love, Loss, and the Supernatural. Her last novel, A Day in June, was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, winner of the Best Book and American Fiction Awards, and a Best New Fiction Award Finalist. “The Woman Who Drew on Walls,” from her new collection, Men Who Walk in Dreams, was a New Millennium Writings Fiction Award Finalist.

She lives in Northampton and Eastham Massachusetts.