Literary Pittsburgh

Though she lives and writes in Brooklyn, Paola Corso’s books are set in her native Pittsburgh area. Her debut novel, Catina's Haircut, follows Calabrian immigrants to the Pittsburgh area and features the Great Flood of 1936, the Strip District, the Italian-American neighborhood of Bloomfield, historical Allegheny Cemetery, and The Point, not to mention her city's Super Bowlers the Pittsburgh Steelers!

Her story collection, Giovanna's 86 Circles, has stories set in her family's former fruit store in the Alle-Kiski Valley where Paola grew up, in Yesterday's News consignment shop on Pittsburgh's South Side, and in the East End where Paola lived when she reported for the Valley News Dispatch and the Pittsburgh Press. Paola's poetry collection, Death by Renaissance, evokes post-industrial Pittsburgh and its blue-collar workers.

Her creative nonfiction introduction in Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women's Voices details Pittsburgh's water politics and environmental history. She applauds the work of organizations such as Group Against Smog and Pollution, Pitt's Center for Environmental Oncology, Women's Health and Environment conferences sponsored by Teresa Heinz, the Rachel Carson Institute and Homestead as well as environmental reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Don Hopey, historian Joel Tarr and activist Larry Evans. See the links below.

She’s proud to be included on The Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Literary and Cultural Heritage Map of Pennsylvania. Look for her listing and biography.

"Much as William Carlos Williams did with his home town of Paterson, so has Paola Corso begun the creation of a fictional version of Pittsburgh, one poem and short story at a time."
—The Pennsylvania Center for the Book

"You can take the poet out of any of 'the Pittsburgh river towns,' but you can’t take the town out of the poet. Paola Corso re-creates it for readers."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Corso literally brings us magic. She does for Pittsburgh what W.P. Kinsella did for baseball in the movie Field of Dreams.”
—WPSU TV fm BookMark

"Readers should hope Corso will continue to delight us with stories of our region."
—Pittsburgh Magazine

"Rich in history, Paola Corso's Catina's Haircut is an imaginative look at the Italian experience in America. Corso's small, vivid stories end up being writ large, alternately personal and universal."
—Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"From the hard, unforgiving soil of Calabria to the congested neighborhood of Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield section, the stories in Catina's Haircut eloquently present the narrative of the Italian immigrant in America. Corso's eye is sharp, fiercely honest yet also able to linger over unexpected beauty when it appears in this demanding landscape."
—Hilary Masters, Carnegie Mellon University

About adopting Paola’s books for classroom use, here’s what one Pittsburgh professor and author had to say:

"I taught Paola Corso's surreal, humorous, and moving collection Giovanna's 86 Circles to a group of undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where the majority of students hail from southwestern PA. What a treat the book was to use. The students immediately identified with the places, characters, and conflicts of Paola's people. These are pieces capturing and celebrating working-class Italian Americans from the Pittsburgh area. Moreover, my students saw an example of a writer from our region who has successfully given the world a vision of the small towns and families of this region. So the book was not only instructive, it was also inspirational."

Stephen Murabito
Associate Professor of English,University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg
Author of Chasing Saint George, The Oswego Fugues, The Communion of Asiago