Our final author event of the year will be one to remember. We’re hosting two smart, witty, and worldly writers who will be engaging in a memorable conversation about their compelling backgrounds and life experiences. Both Suzanne and Mia are celebrating their newly published memoirs in which, among other subjects, they write about the impact their Catholic upbringing and schooling had on them as children of immigrants.

Suzanne's maternal and paternal Polish grandparents immigrated to Massachusetts where her parents made their home one floor above her maternal grandparents and across the street from a polka park. In Compositions, she writes about her years in first to eighth grade in parochial school in the Polish-Catholic enclave that was her community.

Mia tells her story of being surrendered as an infant and taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty, working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. Mia learned early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden, marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves.

Suzanne is the author of six novels and six works of nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in newspapers and magazines through the U.S. and in Ireland. She has taught in four MFA programs and co-directs the Dingle Writers' Workshop and the Iota Short Forms Conference.

Mia is a creative writer who has focused on immigration and assimilation, religious and cultural traditions, and the New England fishing industry. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Stonecoast and is a contributing author of Our People, Our Stories: The Gloucester 400+ Commemorative Book.