Mary Jo Bona is an American literary scholar who has written extensively on Italian-American literature and its history.
[2] After serving for several years as an associate English professor and chair of the Women's Studies department at Gonzaga University,[3][self-published source] she received a stipendiary award and admission to the Academy of Teacher Scholars at Stony Brook.
[1] She has authored and edited several scholarly works, including The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction (1993).
Critic Kenneth Scambray calls The Voices We Carry "a significant contribution to Italian American and women's studies";[4] Fred Gardaphé calls the anthology "a major step in the development of Italian/American literature";[2] and Anthony Tamburri writes that the anthology "blazed a trail.
[6] Bona first became interested in Italian-American women's literature in the late 1980s after reading Helen Barolini's influential anthology, The Dream Book.