Description

Join us for an author talk with Maria (Mia) Millefoglie on her new book Daughters of Stone and Tide.

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Daughters of Stone and Tide traces one Sicilian American family's journey across generations, oceans, and inherited silence. Adopted as an infant by Sicilian immigrants, Maria "Mia" grows up in Gloucester's working-class fishing community, where bloodlines define identity, tradition shapes destiny, and belonging must be earned. Defying expectations, she leaves, only to return decades later to uncover the stories of the family she inherited. Her search reaches back to nineteenth-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned on the "wheel of the castoffs." From castoff to stowaway, he carried the Millefoglie name across the Atlantic, launching three generations into lives ruled by perilous seas, sunken vessels, and hard-won livelihoods. The women held fast on shore. Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging: a fisherman's daughter's search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

Mia will be joined in conversation by Melanie Brooks, author of the books A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. To learn more, visit: melaniebrooks.com.

MARIA (MIA) MILLEFOGLIE is a creative writer who has focused on immigration and assimilation, religious and cultural traditions, women’s roles in the workplace, healthcare, and the New England fishing industry. Her work has appeared in The Stonecoast Review and Entropy, and she is a contributing author of Our People, Our Stories: The Gloucester 400+ Commemorative Book.