Mary Jo Bona

Mary Jo Bona is an American literary scholar who has written extensively on Italian-American literature and its history. She is professor of Italian American Studies and chair of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University.[1]

Bona was born in Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of Wisconsin.[2] After serving for several years as an associate English professor and chair of the Women's Studies department at Gonzaga University,[3] she received a stipendiary award and admission to the Academy of Teacher Scholars at Stony Brook.[1]

She has authored and edited several scholarly works, including The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction (1993). Critic Kenneth Scambray calls The Voices We Carry "a significant contribution to Italian American and women's studies";[4] Fred Gardaphé calls the anthology "a major step in the development of Italian/American literature";[2] and Anthony Tamburri writes that the anthology "blazed a trail."[5] Bona's reviews, articles, and poetry have appeared in American Literary History, Italian Americana, MELUS, NWSA Journal, The Women's Review of Books, and other journals. She published a volume of poems, I Stop Waiting for You, in 2014.[6]

Bona first became interested in Italian-American women's literature in the late 1980s after reading Helen Barolini's influential anthology, The Dream Book.[3][7] She formerly served as president of the Italian American Studies Association, and served on the board of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) for six years.[1]