The Team

Born in Frankfurt, Germany to a military family Jennifer spent her childhood and young adulthood moving from place to place, earning her the honorary title of both "military brat" and "gypsy." She attended the ultra-liberal Evergreen State College where she developed a passion for writing and literature. Although she travels to Europe frequently, she resides in a sleepy little town outside of Seattle where she mothers, paints nudes, balances on her head, tends to her garden, engages in futile attempts at understanding human relationships and maintains her travel and fine art blog.

American-born, Italian-raised Eleonora Baldwin lives in Rome and divides her time between food and lifestyle writing, hosting a prime-time TV show on cheese, and designing Italian culinary holidays. She has published a number of successful books and guides, and is currently editing her cheese & travel-inspired memoir. She is the author/editor/photographer behind the popular blogs Aglio, Olio & Peperoncino and Casa Mia Italy Food & Wine.

Mark Bassani is the pen name of a political and economic writer based in Washington, D.C.

See Dianne's joint bio with William Graebner.

Mark David Campbell grew up in a small village north of lake Ontario, Canada. He spent two decades studying and working in archaeology and anthropology in Central America, Canada, Jordan, Egypt and Greece. He earned his Phd. in social cultural anthropology from the university of Toronto in 1996 and taught as a part-time professor. While on project in Greece he met an Italian doctor, fell in love, got married and set up house in Italy. He paints, writes and teaches, moving between Milan and Lago Maggiore. He has had art shows in Canada and Italy.

Don Carroll is an American attorney in Rome specializing in U.S. income, gift and estate tax, multijurisdictional estate planning and administration and real estate transactions. He is also legal counsel to U.S.-based colleges, universities and non-profit organizations with programs in Italy. He has been a speaker at American Bar Association symposia and has taught at John Cabot University. He is married with one son and his passions are Umbria and the theater.

Kristine Crane lives and writes in North Central Florida. She was formerly a Fulbright scholar and journalist in Rome, where she helped found" The American." She is originally from Iowa City.

Elisa stubbornly decided to move back to Italy after her parents went to the trouble of immigrating to Australia before she was even born. She'd like to say she was possessed by an adventurous spirit, but the real reason was love. Before leaving Melbourne, she earned a journalism degree, with honors, from RMIT University. She now lives and writes in the smallest, but in her opinion, most resplendent corner of the Tuscan countryside, the Maremma. She contributes regularly contributes to Australian Bride, the Herald Sun and The Florentine, among others. She shares her travel tips and stories on her website, Maremma Tuscany, and in her soon-to-be-published guidebook, hoping to inspire intrepid travelers to experience the off-the-beaten track side of Tuscany.

William Graebner is Emeritus Professor of History, State University of New York, Fredonia, where he taught Film and American Culture. His scholarly work includes essays on "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Poseidon Adventure" — and, in progress, a piece on zombie films. His most recent book is "Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America." Dianne Bennett, the first woman to head a large U.S. law firm, is a mostly retired U.S. tax lawyer. The duo indulges their film passion by attending film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival for its first 10 years. Bill and Dianne met at Stanford-in-Italy and have continued their romance with Italy by living in Rome several months each year for the past 20 years (getting around on their Malaguti 250cc scooter). The rest of the year they live in Buffalo, NY, and Los Angeles. They have written two alternative guidebooks to Rome, "Rome the Second Time: 15 Itineraries That Don't Go to the Coliseum" and "Modern Rome: Four Great Walks for the Curious Traveler." Their blog, has almost 700 posts to date.Photo by Bruce Jackson..

Suzanne Dunaway is the author and illustrator of "Rome, At Home, The Spirit of la cucina romana in Your Own Kitchen" (Broadway Books), "No Need To Knead, Handmade Italian Breads in 90 Minutes" (Hyperion) and "No Need to Knead — Metric edition" (Grub Street Publishing). She drew for Gourmet Magazine and The New Yorker for 11 years and has had illustrations published in Orion, Bon Appetit, Wine & Food, among others. She began a bakery in her kitchen, which expanded to become Buona Forchetta Hand Made Breads in Los Angeles, named by "W" magazine as "the best bread in the world." She is a member of Les Dames d'Escoffier, and taught cooking for 15 years privately and at cooking schools in Los Angeles. In her atelier in France, she paints naked women falling through space and other subjects, cooks like a madwoman and tends her garden.

Ex-Rabelais scholar, "Scriptorium" boss Fogarty skipped from degreeland to clock-filling doublejobs in NYC: ghetto teaching; freelance copyediting Prentice Hall. The next, Italian experience added translation word games. In Rome, jump-started an Italian publisher’s English-language series, cinema-slanted. Over years, time snatched for travel pieces, short stories, placed wherever they fell. "Scriptorium": a few monthly grafs from an over-booked head.

See Bill's bio under William Graebner and Dianne Bennett.

Associate editor Madeleine Johnson, who writes the "Notebook" column, is a midwesterner who lived in Italy for almost three decades. She has degrees in art history from Wellesley College and U.C. Berkeley. To her monthly column for the American, she brings three decades of thought and research on a wide range of Italian social and political matters, including education, history, politics, literature and culture. She has also written about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for the New York Post and about Italian real estate, urban growth, confiscation of Mafia property as well as travel and food for the Financial Times.

Madeline Klosterman was born and raised in rural Ohio. Now, after 15 years, she calls New York City home. She received her BA from the State University of New York and studied at the Writer's Studio with Pulitzer Prize winning author Phillip Shultz. She works for an international news media company and has written her "American Girl" column since 2008.

Susan Levenstein, MD, fell in love with Italy in 1970, returned to her native New York City for medical training, and moved to Rome shortly after becoming Board Certified in Internal Medicine in 1978. The primary care office practice she founded in 1980 has thrived ever since (See her professional site here). In a parallel research career Dr. Levenstein has explored the influence of psychological factors on diseases such as peptic ulcer, inflammatory bowel disease, and hypertension, with more than 60 scientific publications. She once wrote a weekly medical column for the Rome Daily American and is now working on a book about her adventures with Italian health, lifestyle, and medical care. She blogs on similar topics at Stethoscope on Rome.

Elaine Luti has been a psychotherapist in private practice for well over 30 years. She has taught psychology at various universities in Italy and worked as a college counsellor with international students in Rome for more than 20. She also teaches in an Italian post-graduate psychotherapy school and supervises student therapists. She and her Italian husband have two adult children who grew up as bilingual Italians (she's also a grandmother). She earned a BFA in painting in Boston, but later turned to psychology, studying at Rome's La Sapienza. Her interests include calligraphy, cooking, singing, and reading.

Letizia lives on a magical mountain near Assisi. Born and raised in Italy, she learned to cook from her Sicilian mother and to dream about the world from her Umbrian father. A former behavioral ecologist, she left academia together with her husband Ruurd to renovate a 500-year-old farmhouse. Years of hard work yielded a family-run B&B and a cooking school, Alla Madonna del Piatto (including daughter Tea and dog Google). Letizia's recipes and tales of Umbrian life appear on her blog. In 2015, she published a cookbook called "A Kitchen With a View."

Though named for Tolkien's Elvish forest, Lorien didn't write much herself until college, where she took a journalism course because her biology advisor told her not to. After graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Illinois, she edited and wrote in the Chicago area before finally deciding to attend medical school. She is now in her third year at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Lorien's medical interests include palliative care and preventive medicine. She cannot conceive of a world without alliteration and assonance.

Scarlet is a writer living in Los Angeles. She loves a good espresso and is sometimes mistaken for Italian.

Eleonora was born in Milan. Her education has been eclectic. Since joining an Australian play group, she has attended Italian elementary school, British and then an Italian middle school, Italian liceo, American boarding school, American women's college, British university, and is now enrolled at Brown University in the U.S. When Eleonora is not acting, writing or watching comedy, she spends her time drinking tea, worrying too much about everything and spouting spoonerisms. Her column appears bimonthly.

Our book staff consists of writers who contribute regularly and those who chip in from time to time. Names are withheld because the reviews are about the book, not the writer of the review. Our notices are intended only to spread interest in reading by proving unique vantage points and occasionally uncommon literary positions. Some reviews are signed.

David Winner's first novel, "The Cannibal of Guadalajara," won the Gival Novel prize and has earned praise from National Book Award winners Shirley Hazzard and John Casey. His short fiction has been nominated twice for the Pushcart and the Associated Writing Programs Intro prize, as well as winning the 2003 Ledge Magazine Short Story contest. He has published in The Village Voice, Fiction, Confrontation, Dream Catcher, The Cortland Review and several other journals in the U.S. and UK. Another story, "My Lover's Moods" was made into a short film screened at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Christopher P. Winner was born in Paris, France. He founded The American in 2004. Before that, he was executive editor of The Prague Post and the London-based European correspondent for USA Today. An American citizen, Winner lives in Rome and has been based in Europe for most of his career. He writes the column Area 51 He's a lifelong Neil Young and New York Yankees fan.

A military brat, Marcia Yarrow was born in Hamburg, Germany but gewq up in Germany, Spain, and Provo, Utah. She's been writing for the magazine since its creation in 2004.