Paola Corso is an award-winning author of seven books of poetry and fiction set in her native Pittsburgh where her Southern Italian immigrant family worked in the steel mills. Her books include the newly-released Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps; The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing; Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, featuring garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories. She co-edited and wrote the creative introduction to Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women’s Voices published by Routledge.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Women’s Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, U.S. Catholic, and numerous anthologies. Her writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. A literary activist, Corso was a resident writer in the National Endowment for the Arts WritersCorps and is co-founder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarded poetry project celebrating city steps. Her community service has earned her a place on the Mid-Atlantic Art Foundation’s Artist & Communities Short List.

At NYSCAS, Prof. Corso teaches Poetry, Fiction, and Ethnic Studies in the Languages and Literature Department in Manhattan, as well as Fundamentals of Speech and Public Speaking in the Speech and Communication Department. In addition, she coordinates two Learning Resource Centers in Brooklyn.

She holds an undergraduate degree from Boston College and master’s degrees in creative writing/English from City College of New York (CUNY), and in public administration/community organizing from San Francisco State University. She is also a graduate of the University of Denver’s Publishing Institute.