Imma Vitelli will talk about how her personal column for Marie Claire came about and what it is like to write it. The talk will be full of anecdotes about discovering the familiar in the unfamiliar and how traveling solo can give you the distance to really see what you are leaving and where you are going to.
“The column is about going beyond borders, traveling in the world and learning lessons about the human soul that are the same everywhere. I will talk about how dreams inform my writing and what the last custodian of Merapi vulcano in Java taught me one sunny morning in the spring. I will talk about how, anywhere in the world, the most generous are the poor and what conversations with fighters and queens, smugglers and tightrope walkers taught me.”
Vitelli´s talk will be followed by a writing workshop for NYU Florence students, in which Vitelli will guide a small group of students through the process of starting with an idea, a setting, a bottom line, and trying to put it into words and will give students individual feedback on their work.
Student work from Imma Vitelli´s Fall 2014 talk from ´Escaping Hyenas: From Eritrea to Lampedusa´and writing workshop is featured here.
Featured Biographies
Imma Vitelli
Journalist and Author
Imma Vitelli is an International Correspondent of Vanity Fair Italy. She joined Vanity Fair covering the 33-day Israeli war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006; ever since she has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and many other countries. She covered the Arab Spring in Tunisia and in Egypt and was one of the first foreign reporters to travel to Benghazi to tell the story of the beginning of the Libyan revolution. She was born in Matera, Italy, in 1970, and has a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York. After spending one year in Cairo and eight years in Beirut, she is currently based in Rome.