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Maria Marotti was born and raised in Rome, Italy. She also lived as a
child in the Italian-Slovenian border city of Trieste. After high school
in Rome, she attended the Translator and Interpreter School, where she
also completed a degree in French and English translation and
interpreting. She worked for the US Embassy, publishers, industries and
the Italian Parliament.
Her interest in literature brought her to the University of Venice, Ca
Foscari, where she completed a summa cum laude laurea degree in Foreign
Languages and Literatures with a focus on North American literature, and
a thesis on Mark Twain's posthumously published works. In 1975, she was
granted a Fulbright scholarship to the United States to further her
research. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara,
where she completed a M.A. in English and, later, a Ph. D. in English. An
expanded and revised version of her dissertation on Mark Twain was later
published by Penn State University Press in 1990, with the title: The
Duplicating Imagination. Twain and the Twain Papers.
She taught for eleven years at the University of Rome-La Sapienza, as a
tenured researcher in North American Literature. In 1985, she organized a
conference on American Autobiography and later published a book on that
subject as co-editor and co-author by the title of, Identitaé
Scrittura. Saggi sull--autobiografia nord-americana (1988).
She then moved to Santa Barbara, California to be with her husband. In
1987 she was hired as a Lecturer in Italian at the French and Italian
Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1996, she
was hired for a year as a visiting assistant professor at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. In 1991, she organized a conference on Italian
Women Writers and later had a collection published from the proceedings
of that conference, Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the
Present. The Revision of the Canon (Penn State University Press, 1995).
She was both editor and co-author of the collection. She was also
co-editor and co-author of another collection, Gendering Italian Fiction.
Feminist Revisions of Italian History (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1999).
During her ten years at the UC, she attended conferences, presented
papers, organized and chaired panels, and had numerous articles of
literary criticism published.
In 1996, she left academia to devote herself to studies in transpersonal
psychology (holotropic breathwork, deep memory process, hypnosis and
Reiki). She now practices hypnotherapy, especially for smoke cessation
and volunteers as a Reiki practitioner.
A fiction writer ever since she was a teenager, she resumed her fiction
writing and, during the last ten years has produced several short
stories, three screenplays, and two novels. A Question of Class (Publish
America, 2006) is her first published novel.
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