The characters in Pigeon Soup & Other Stories are navigating relationships and grappling with issues of translocation, language and identity, religion and culture, and food. These tales portray the dark places they inhabit physically, emotionally, or metaphorically, with twists that sometimes provide a flicker—or even a bright beam—of hope

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At three years of age, Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli immigrated from Calabria, Italy, to Sudbury, Ontario, Canada with her family. During her teaching career, she received four OECTA (Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association) Best Practice Awards for her unique strategies in early literacy and other initiatives. An alumna of the Humber School for Writers, her writing has been published in nineteen anthologies. Her novel, La Brigantessa, published in 2018, won a Gold Medal for Historical Fiction in the 2019 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards. La Brigantessa was also a finalist for the 2019 Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Book Award and the 2019 Northern Lit Award. Her children’s book, Pumpkin Orange, Pumpkin Round, was published in the fall of 2019, and she has published two novels with Harlequin UK (2018, 2020). She lives in Sudbury. www.rosannabattigelli.com

Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli's profile page

"Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli's stories interweave themes and recurring characters into a marvelous tapestry of cultural expression and cultural dissonance. She negotiates these byways with warmth, insight, and a true mastery of narrative ellipsis. Although she never flinches from darkness and tragedy, the generosity of spirit in this work will, for the reader, act like a balm for a troubled age."
—Paul Butler, author of Mina's Child and The Widow's Fire

"These stories have an intriguing and child-like gaze that also turn a spotlight into some very dark corners— high-school bullying, sexual abuse, and childhood trauma. Notwithstanding the bones in the broth that threaten to choke, this collection is pigeon soup for the soul that rewards its reader. It may be the wonderment, the ultimate resilience or pushback of some of its characters. Whatever the ingredients, hats off to a brave Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli for making us Pigeon Soup."
—Darlene Madott, award-winning author of Making Olives and Other Family Secrets

"Reading Pigeon Soup is like being spirited into a chiaroscuro small town, receiving a gift of sight that reveals all hidden shames and unseen heroism. Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli sees into the heart of a fraught and beautiful heritage, and draws the reader in with great love to enjoy the aching, funny, proud, devastating, and delicious experience of being Italian American."
—Donna Lee Miele, contributing writer, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana

"An exquisitely crafted, engaging and lively collection of novelle, Pigeon Soup & Other Stories, similarly to the sumptuous Mediterranean dishes seductively garnishing its pages, serves us a reading to be savoured, much like anything that is fine in life. Woven into a realist framework of old-country customs and new-world expectations, the narrative’s interlacing strands of solid plot, sound psychological character study, and language and identity issues deploy an intense literary glow that caresses our sensibilities. Refreshingly innovative, too, the other side of the coin: the stories are not exclusive to one culture. And so, having enjoyed Nonna’s "comforting bowl" of free-run unadulterated pigeon soup we find ourselves invited across the street (that is, across the page) to a "delicious bowl of Lipton’s chicken soup." Ah, the joys of a pleasurable text, as Barthes would say."
—Gabriel Niccoli, Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo. editor of Ricordi: Racconti di vite oltreoceano and Patterns of Nostos in Italian Canadian Narratives