Helen Barolini

Helen Barolini (November 18, 1925 - March 29, 2023) was an American writer, editor, and translator.

Early life and education

Helen Frances Mollica was born on November 18, 1925, in Syracuse, New York, to Italian-American parents. Her father, Anthony S. Mollica, was a fruit merchant whose family came from Spadafora, Sicily. Her mother, Angela Cardamone, was born in Utica, New York, to immigrants from Castagna, a small village in Calabria. Although both sets of grandparents were Italian immigrants, Barolini spoke no Italian as a child because her parents actively discouraged the use of the language at home. She later studied the language formally while attending Syracuse University, hiring a private tutor to help her learn Italian.

Barolini graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University in 1947, received a diploma di profitto from the University of Florence in 1950, and earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University in 1959.

Career After graduating from Syracuse, Barolini traveled to Italy, studying in Perugia and writing articles for the Syracuse Herald-Journal. It was there that she met and married the Italian writer, Antonio Barolini.

Assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Barolini completed her first book in 1979: the novel Umbertina, for which she received the Americans of Italian Heritage award for literature in 1984 and the Premio Acerbi, an Italian literary prize, in 2008. The novel is named for a fictional character who emigrates to the U.S. from Calabria. It was praised by novelists Alice Walker and Cynthia Ozick, and hailed as a major work by critic Jules Chametzky. In an essay on Italian-American novelists, Fred Gardaphé writes, "Until The Dream Book appeared in 1985, Italian American women had not had the critics or literary historians who would attempt to probe their background, unlock the reasons of past silence, and acknowledge that they are finally present."

Barolini's essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Ms., the Yale Review, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, the Prairie Schooner, and other journals. and her essay, "How I Learned to Speak Italian," originally published in the Southwest Review, was included in The Best American Essays 1998.

Barolini was an invited writer at Yaddo (1965) and the MacDowell Colony (1974); writer in residence at the Quarry Farm Center of Elmira College (1989); a Rockefeller Foundation resident scholar at Bellagio Center in Lake Como (1991); and visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (2001).

Helen Barolini died in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on March 29, 2023, at the age of 97.