Claiming Kin, a first novel by Laura Marello, associate professor of English at University of Lynchburg, is being published this month by Guernica Editions in Toronto, Canada.
Set in Santa Cruz, California; San Remo, Italy; Paris, France; and a fictional town called Pottersville, North Carolina (based on Weaverville, North Carolina), the novel relates the story of two intertwined families and their battles and conflicts over kinship from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Excerpts of the novel were included in the 1994/2004 Voices We Carry anthology published by Guernica.
Ms. Marello joined the University of Lynchburg faculty in 2003. She holds a B. A. degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M. A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She held a postgraduate Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown Fellowship, Vogelstein Foundation Grant, Deming Grant and residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Djerassi and Montalvo Center for the Arts.
Her fiction has been published by James Laughlin in New DirectionsAnthology and Gordon Lish in Q, as well as in the Mississippi Review, Chicago Review, and other magazines and anthologies.
