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Paola Corso is an American fiction writer, poet, and essayist. Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow and Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner, and is the author of Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels, Giovanna’s 86 Circles And Other Stories, a Binghamton University's John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist, a book of poems, Death by Renaissance, and newly released poetry collections, The Laundress Catches Her Breath and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, about Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Her books are set in the Pittsburgh area, where her Southern Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mill. Her themes include ethnicity, the working class, social change, and magical leaps. Corso has also written poetry books about growing up near a toxic dump that was on the EPA's Superfund List, the city's history of water and air pollution, and the link between cancer and a polluted environment in the workplace. She co-edited an anthology, Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women's Voices and wrote an introductory personal essay on the subject of industrial pollution.
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