Wallis Wilde-Menozzi grew up in Wisconsin, where her love of nature and introspection were natural responses to daily life. She took part in the social movements of the sixties, tried to get her bearings, and wrote poetry, especially once she reached California and its wide-open ways of viewing life. From there she went back to Europe (she had lived and taught in Oxford, England) and eventually settled in Parma, Italy, where she has lived with her Italian population biologist husband for thirty-five years. With strong teaching links to Switzerland, her work has the broad philosophical strokes of many writers who dealt with multiple origins and cultures. Drawing on the rich background of the Mediterranean way of life, her work is suffused with questions about identity posed by culture and language. A novelist, a poet, an essayist, as well as an author of two books of memoir, she is an utterly original writer, having forged a style that brings together narration in a new way.
