235 Wellesley Street
Weston, MA 02493
Dr. Lisella is professor of English in the department of Humanities. She teaches courses in American literature, creative writing, and the medical humanities. Prior to Regis College, Dr. Lisella taught in the History and Literature concentration at Harvard College. She is a poet and a scholar of women’s writing, specializing in the American modernist period, contemporary poetics, multiethnic US writing, and writing and healing. She recently co-edited the essay collection Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement, part of Lexington Press’s “Activism and Innovation in American Women’s Writing” series, and is the author of two full length poetry collections: Always (Wordtech editions 2014), Terrain (Wordtech editions 2007) and a chapbook of poems, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press 2004). Her poems appear frequently in literary journals, including most recently Exit 7, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Ocean State Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Italian American Review, Salamander, Gravel, B O D Y, and many others. Her poems have been anthologized in a number of collections, including To Learn the Future: Poems for Teachers, Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Anthology, and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. Currently, she co-curates the Italian American Writers Association in Boston Literary Series at I Am Books in Boston’s North End.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in English Literature, Tufts University
Master of Arts in Creative Writing, New York University
Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude, Barnard College
Undergraduate coursework in Italian Language and Literature, The State University of New York, International Program at Urbino, Italy.
Virginia Pyne Kaneb Faculty Scholar, Regis College
John Clive Teaching Prize, Harvard University
Medford community grant, Massachusetts Cultural Council
Cardinal, Jody, Deirdre Egan-Ryan, and Julia Lisella, editors. Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement. Activism and Innovation in American Women’s Writing Series. New York: Lexington Books, 2019.
Our Lively Kingdom, poems. Bordighera Press, 2022.
Always, poems. WordTech Editions, 2014.
Terrain, poems. WordTech Editions, 2007.
Love Song Hiroshima, chapbook. Finishing Line Press, 2004.
"Radical Reinvention of the Lyric in Genevieve Taggard's Poems of Hawai'i." Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement: Resistance and Reform. Lexington Books, 2019.
"Genevieve Taggard's Socialist Feminist Interventions in Lyric Making." Critical Insights Readings in Feminist Literature. Ed. Robert Evans. Salem Press, 2018.
"Rebel Daughters: Margaret Walker and Muriel Rukeyser." Critical Insights Readings in Feminist Literature. Ed. Robert Evans. Salem Press, 2018.
"Against Ageism: Reading "A Sunset of the City" by Gwendolyn Brooks at Mid-Life." Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Guest Ed. Quraysh Ali Lansana, vol. 43, no. 2, 2017, pp. 167-176.
"Learning To Teach Tillie Olsen's 'I Stand Here Ironing.'" Mama Ph.D.: Women Write About Motherhood and the Academy. Eds. Elrena Evans, Caroline Grant. Rutgers U P, 2007.
"Modernism, Maternity, and the Radical Woman Poet," Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture 19th and 20th Century. Ed. Robin Hammerman. Cambridge Scholars P, 2007.
"Behind the Mask: Signs of Radicalism in the Work of Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni," The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Labor, Politics, and Culture. Eds. Philip Cannistraro, Gerald Meyer. Praeger P, 2004.