KENNETH SCAMBRAY, Biography

Born in Fresno, California, Kenneth Scambray received his Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Since 1981, he has taught in the Dept. of English at the University of La Verne, located in Southern California.

Among his other American literature courses, he teaches courses on North American Italian literature and Los Angeles fiction. In 1999, Prof. Scambray began a culture course that includes a three-week tour of Italy every January.

His published works include A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (U Pittsburgh P, 1987), The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica Editions, 2000), Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica Editions, 2004), and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2006).

His poetry and fiction have appeared in national publications and has been anthologized in a collection of Sicilian American writers, Sweet Lemons (2004, and Writing Beyond History: An anthology of Prose and Poetry (Cusmano, 2006).

Since 1978, Prof. Scambray has been the book and film critic for I’Italo-Americano, where he has published over 250 reviews on Italian and Italian American literature and film.

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