DiRENZO, Anthony 1960-

PERSONAL: Born January 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Philip (a fashion executive) and Maria Bilo DiRenzo (a storyteller and homemaker); married Sharon Elizabeth Ahlers (a teacher and academic counselor), May 12, 1990. Education: S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, B.S., 1982; Villanova University, M.A., 1986; Syracuse University, Ph.D., 1990. Politics: "Conservative by Temperament, Radical by Default." Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Opera, theater.

ADDRESSES: Home—507 Hector St., Ithaca, NY. Office—Department of Writing, Ithaca College, Park 223, Ithaca, NY 14850.

CAREER: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, adjunct professor of English, 1990-93; Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, associate professor in Department of Writing, 1990—. Also worked variously as copywriter, public relations agent, broadcaster, lector, cantor, and Eucharistic minister.

MEMBER: National Council of Teachers of English, College Composition and Communication, Modern Language Association, International Humor Society, Pirandello Society of America, Association of Business Communicators, Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Italian American Writers Association, Onondaga historical Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pushcart Prize nomination, 1998, for "Exiles from Cockaigne: Pimping Sausages and Other Italian-American Tragedies"; Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays nomination, 1999, for "Coffeehouse Philosophy."

WRITINGS:

American Gargoyles: Flannery O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1993.

If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of SinclairLewis, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1997.

Also author of "Exiles from Cockaigne: Pimping Sausages and Other Italian-American Tragedies," 1997, "Coffeehouse Philosophy," 1998, "Eddie, Kiss Me Goodnight," 1998; "The Apotheosis of Brumidi," 1999, and "Tears and Onions," 2000, all appearing in River Styx. Stories published in literary journals, including Il Caffé, Syracuse Scholar, Studia Mistica, Kansas Review, Coydog Review, Pangloss Papers, Quixote, and Saw Hill Journal.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Novels, including After the Fair Is Over, The Altar and the City, and His Master's Voice; essay collection Bitter Greens; critical study The Great American Dream Machine: John Dos Passos' USA; opera libretto, Canallers, a retelling of Giacomo Puccini's Il Tabarrro set on the Syracuse Erie Canal circa 1910.

SIDELIGHTS: Anthony DiRenzo told CA: "Like those professional letter writers, who plied their trade in Little Italies all over America at the turn of the century, I find myself a messenger between two worlds, struggling with the problems of audience and language. Having been raised in a largely oral minority culture, how do I do it justice by writing about it in the words of the literate culture that has marginalized it, that has, in fact, done everything in its power to eradicate it? To be an Italian-American writer is to embrace contradiction and to court betrayal. What kind of double agent am I, and to whom do I owe my allegiance? Like the old proverb says, Traduttore traditore. The very hyphen between the two words, Italian and American, symbolizes this dilemma. It is both a bridge and a plank, a checkpoint and a toll gate. An American education has made me an unwilling participant in the destruction of Italian immigrant culture, but without that education I could not preserve the culture of my childhood from complete annihilation. Basically, I'm a chronicler of a fading world, a notary public recording the depositions of ghosts. My fiction and most of my scholarship can be likened to an open coroner's inquest in which an entire community agonizes over the overwhelming evidence of its own demise and asks if it was murder, suicide, or accidental death. Naturally, such business is ghastly, relieved only by the sardonic humor of its participants. But culturecide does that, turns ordinary people into self-mocking skeletons. Each time I press my fingers to my keyboard, I hear the rattling of bones.

"Put another way, my writing documents the necrophilic commodification of Italian culture in the Great Shopping Mall of America. I am appalled by how bits and pieces of my world become transubstantiated into stickers, t-shirts, and fast food. Such relentless commercialism is a Satanic parody of the Eucharist, a form of cannibalism in which my people are both consumers and the consumed."