Under Old Stars ― Wanderings in Italian Hill Towns

Mauro Marinelli is an artist, photographer, contractor, great cook, one-time novitiate, and former photojournalist. Born and raised in White Plains, New York to Italian immigrant parents, he earned a BFA in in Photography and English from Manhattanville College in 1977. His art is inspired by the work of his teachers, Ralph Gibson, Eva Rubenstein, and Sean Kernan. In the late 1970s Marinelli traveled around the US to photograph the last of the original Italian immigrants before they were gone. St. Martin’s Press published Marinelli’s book of photography, Old Timers: The Italians in 1979. His iconic cemetery images captured on Polaroid, The Burden of Wings, was published by Kehrer in 2014.

Rob Lloyd was born in New York City and grew up in the Finger Lakes district of upstate NY. He graduated from the Creative Writing Program at The University of New Hampshire where he studied with Charles Simic, the fifteenth U.S. Poet Laureate, and novelist Russell Banks. Breaking into television as a writer on a popular show, Lloyd spent most of his career in Los Angeles writing and producing TV shows for network and syndication, eventually serving as show runner for daytime talk shows and producing news in markets around the country. Currently, Lloyd is an English professor, teaching writing, literature, and film in Knoxville and directs study-abroad programs in Paris.