Joie Davidow

Joie Davidow is the author of a memoir, Marked for Life (Harmony), and Infusions of Healing (Fireside), as well as the novel I Wouldn't Leave Rome to Go to Heaven. With Esmeralda Santiago, she is the co-editor of two story anthologies Las Mamis and Las Christmas (both Alfred A. Knopf). She was a co-founder of the L.A. Weekly and founder of L.A. Style and Sí magazines. She lives in Rome, Italy, where she leads creative writing workshops and acts as a freelance book editor and writing coach. Her newest book, the historical novel An Unofficial Marriage, is the result of years of research that took her to London, France, and Germany. A trained opera singer, drew on her own experience to tell the story of the life-long love of the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev for the famed diva Pauline Viardot. Joie is currently at work on a second historic novel, Anything but Yes, the true story a young woman’s struggle to defend her identity in the face of relentless attempts to destroy it.  In 1749, 18-year-old Anna del Monte was seized at gunpoint from her home in the Jewish ghetto in Rome and thrown into a convent cell at the Casa dei Convertiti, the house of converts. With no access to the outside world, she withstood endless lectures, threats, promises, isolation, and sleep deprivation, at times nearly succumbing, then finding a new source of inner strength.