Rosina Lippi is an associate professor of linguistics in the English Department at Western Washington University. The Rosenau of Homestead is an amalgam of several villages in Vorarlberg, Austria’s westernmost province, where she lived and worked for four years. As she writes, during those years she “spent many hours talking to women of all ages . . . While I was listening to their vowels, they were teaching me what it means to be a storyteller.”

Lippi was born and raised in a predominantly German neighborhood of Chicago. “To this day,” she says, “I don’t know how we ended up in that neighborhood. My father had grown up in Italy; my mother’s grandparents came to the Chicago area in the late 1800s from all over northern Europe.” Between her junior and senior years at St. Benedict’s Catholic school, she spent the summer in Austria on an American Field Service scholarship; and she returned to Austria for two years “the day after I graduated from high school.” After she returned to Chicago, she spent seven years wandering “from Chicago to Boston and New Jersey and back to Chicago. I managed to pull myself together, went back to school, and finished my undergraduate degree.” Her doctoral thesis in linguistics at Princeton took her back to Vorarlberg, where she gathered material for her dissertation and for Homestead. Marriage and a daughter followed, as did academic tenure and a series of publications. Then, “little by little, my focus shifted to storytelling. Homestead was written over a five-year period.” Other stories followed. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Glimmer Train Stories, and Redbook.

Now, at Western Washington University, Lippi says “I have mountains to look at . . . I teach linguistics and creative writing, and I write in a room of my own, with a view.”

Books by Rosina Lippi