Paola Corso


Paola Corso is an American fiction writer, poet, and essayist. Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow and Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner, and is the author of Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels, Giovanna’s 86 Circles And Other Stories, a Binghamton University's John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist, a book of poems, Death by Renaissance, and newly released poetry collections, The Laundress Catches Her Breath and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, about Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Her books are set in the Pittsburgh area, where her Southern Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mill. Her themes include ethnicity, the working class, social change, and magical leaps. Corso has also written poetry books about growing up near a toxic dump that was on the EPA's Superfund List, the city's history of water and air pollution, and the link between cancer and a polluted environment in the workplace. She co-edited an anthology, Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women's Voices and wrote an introductory personal essay on the subject of industrial pollution.
Formerly a writer-in-residence in Western Connecticut State University’s MFA Program in Creative and Professional Writing, Corso is currently a lecturer in Chatham University's MFA Program in Creative Writing. She lives in New York City.

Life, career, and community organizing

Corso was born in the Alle-Kiski Valley of Allegheny County, in the Pittsburgh area and lived as a young adult in the city's East End neighborhood, Squirrel Hill. She graduated from Boston College with her BA in Sociology. She continued her education at San Francisco State University, where she obtained an MPA in Public Administration/Community Organizing. In 1999, Corso received her MA in Creative Writing/English from City College of New York/ CUNY.
Before teaching creative writing at the college level, Corso was a community organizer and grant writer for non-profits. She created collaborative community arts projects. She partnered with Northside Common Ministries, a Pittsburgh ecumenical organization and its members to co-write plays with Michael Winks about homelessness and hunger, based on interviews they conducted in shelters and food pantries. House of Cards was produced at Pittsburgh Public Theater and Leftovers was awarded a state grant from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Corso was also a resident writer for the National Endowment for the Arts WritersCorps in the Bronx where she introduced literary arts in hospitals and senior centers. She co-founded the National Writers Union New York Local's Community Writing Project and led writing workshops in a Manhattan shelter for single mothers. Her community service earned her a place on the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist & Communities Short List. Most recently, she co-curated the reading series, WORDsprouts at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn and founded Writers in the Wall, a creative writing workshop and reading series in the Pittsburgh river town of Aspinwall.
She is the daughter of Vincenza Marie Calderone and Mario Procopio Corso. Corso is married to Michael Winks; the couple has two sons, Giona Donato Mariano Corso-Winks and Mario Corso-Winks.

Works

Books