Volume II contains six plays. The English-language plays are: Novena, by Marie-Beath Badian, a play about a detached and estranged daughter’s return home to say a Novena for her father who is sick in the Philippines; The Clothesline, by Donna Caruso, a fun and loving narration about three generations of Canadian women and their experiences far from the land of their birth; Spring Arrival, by Marjorie Chan, introduces us to an unforgettable Hong Kong immigrant who cheers up the other patients in her hospital ward with stories about the cultural misunderstandings of her first days in Toronto; The Gift, by Marty Chan, a touching story behind the desperate attempt of a mother, who fled China during the Great Cultural Revolution, to pass down the family’s dumpling recipe to her daughter; Say Ginger Ale, by Marcia Johnson, a play in which a Jamaican Canadian woman returns to her homeland and finds herself forced to rediscover the value of what she has left behind and confirm fundamental truths about immigrant life; One Officer’s Experiences, by Arthur J. Vaughan, the compassionate and humorous memoir of an immigration officer stationed at Halifax’s Ocean terminal who greeted the arrival of immigrants for twenty years spanning the great post-war influx.

Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, and educator. Translations include: selections from Italian Renaissance drama and dramatic theory (Sources of Dramatic Theory, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ugo Betti’s The Queen and the Rebels (Pro Arte Productions, Toronto, 1997); The Fellini Radio Plays, translated and adapted for the stage from radio plays by Federico Fellini (Stratford Festival 2002); a play Love Letters from the Empty Bed, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides, (staged at the Glenn Morris Studio Theatre and the Canadian Opera Company’s Bradshaw Amphitheatre, 2012); and the novel Between Rothko and Three Windows: Murder at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Quattro books, 2016). Essays, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Saturday Night Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Grail Magazine, CBC Radio, and Il Quotidiano della Calabria. As editor, director and producer Damiano explored the theme of exile and return and the emergence of a post-national drama in such series as Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration (Scirocco Books, 2005), Little Italies (2006, CBC Audio Books, 2007). Essays, poetry and short fiction have been translated into Italian and published in A Filo Doppio, Ed. By Francesco Loriggio and Vito Teti, Donzelli, Rome 2017.

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