Helen Barolini

Helen Frances Mollica[1] was born on November 18, 1925, in Syracuse, New York,[2] to Italian-American parents. Her father was a local merchant.[3] Although her grandparents were Italian immigrants, Barolini spoke no Italian until she hired a tutor at Syracuse to teach her the language.[4]

Barolini graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University in 1947, received a diploma di profitto from the University of Florence in 1950, and earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University in 1959.[3]

After graduating from Syracuse, Barolini traveled to Italy, studying in Perugia and writing articles for the Syracuse Herald-Journal. It was there that she met and married the Italian writer, Antonio Barolini.[4] The couple lived in Italy for several years before moving to New York. She translated several of her husband's works into English, including "Our Last Family Countess" (1960) and "A Long Madness" (1964).[5]

Assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Barolini completed her first book in 1979: the novel Umbertina, for which she received the Americans of Italian Heritage award for literature in 1984 and the Premio Acerbi, an Italian literary prize, in 2008.[6] The novel is named for a fictional character who emigrates to the U.S. from Calabria.[3]

Her anthology, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Susan Koppelman Award from the American Culture Association.[2] It was praised by novelists Alice Walker and Cynthia Ozick, and hailed as a major work by critic Jules Chametzky.[7] In an essay on Italian-American novelists, Fred Gardaphé writes, "Until The Dream Book appeared in 1985, Italian American women had not had the critics or literary historians who would attempt to probe their background, unlock the reasons of past silence, and acknowledge that they are finally present."[8]

Barolini's essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Ms., the Yale Review, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, the Prairie Schooner, and other journals.[3] Her essay collection, Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity (1997), was named a Notable Work of American Literary Non-Fiction in The Best American Essays of the Century (2000),[9] and her essay, "How I Learned to Speak Italian," originally published in the Southwest Review, was included in The Best American Essays 1998.[4]

Barolini was an invited writer at Yaddo (1965) and the MacDowell Colony (1974); writer in residence at the Quarry Farm Center of Elmira College (1989); a Rockefeller Foundation resident scholar at Bellagio Center in Lake Como (1991); and visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (2001).[2] She has won numerous prizes and grants for her literary work. She also taught at Trinity College, Kirkland College, and Pace University; served as associate editor for the Westchester Illustrated; and worked as a librarian in Westchester, New York.[2] In 1988 she was invited to speak at York University in Toronto by Joseph Pivato, the M.A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies.

In 1950, she married Antonio Barolini.[3] The couple had three daughters. Teodolinda Barolini became a professor of Italian at Columbia University; Susanna Barolini married an Italian artist from Urbino, and moved to Italy;[4] and Nicoletta Barolini became an art director, also at Columbia. Antonio Barolini died in 1971.[1]

Helen Barolini died in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on March 29, 2023, at the age of 97.[10][11]