Individual Author Record
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General InformationName: Michele MoranoPen Name: None Genre: Non-Fiction Born: in Poughkeepsie, New York Sites:
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Illinois Connection
Morano lives in Chicago.Biographical and Professional Information
Michele Morano holds a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She lives in Chicago, where she is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University.Published Works 
Titles At Your Library
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Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books) ISBN: 158729530X University Of Iowa Press. 2007 In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world. Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel. |