Cecilia Gigliotti

Head of Outreach & Editor-in-Chief (WWBL Magazine)

Cecilia is a writer, photographer, podcaster, and musician. Much of her work consists of travel highlights, language musings, and pop culture criticism. She holds the MA in English from Central Connecticut State University and the BA in Creative Writing from the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. Her short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art have appeared in collections, anthologies, journals, newspapers, and WWBL’s own in-house publications; she also served as Poetry Editor of volume 2 of the Connecticut Literary Festival Anthology. A New England native, she has lived in Berlin since July 2019.

Her latest projects can be found here.

Tell us who you are in 3 book titles:

Anne Bradstreet’s The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet

Bradstreet was the first prominent woman poet in the American colonies. Encountering this volume on my dad’s office bookshelf was a literary milestone of my childhood; I was imitating her style and voice by age five. Her belief in things bigger than herself and her frank criticism of the misogynistic practices of her day captivated me. Human frailty, hope, spirituality…there was no subject she shied away from. In high school I even won a national prize for memorizing and reciting her meditation on a devastating house fire. She is my poetic guardian angel.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

This one is self-evident in that I didn’t have to consciously choose it. It chose me, long ago, and I revisit it constantly. I will always have reason to look up to and learn from Jo March: she both reaps the benefits and suffers the consequences of having different priorities from her community’s. And yet, keen as she is to strike out on her own with her talents, she is deeply aware of her place in a tight network of strong personalities. It’s perennially gratifying for me, as a reader, to watch these opposing forces exert their pull on her. The title could not be more apt: the four central girls have been forced by their circumstances into early emotional maturity. They also understand that their first and greatest commitment is to one another—which, having a sister myself, I respond to without fail.

Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre

Another parable of sisterhood. Fantasy has never been my go-to genre, so this one gets particularly high praise. Levine is a master; she imbues her settings and plots with such aching humanity that it’s hard not to become invested. I see myself in both Addie and Meryl. There are constant surprises, from the inciting incidents to the event that ultimately reunites the sisters. And the mythology of their country, the folklore informing the epic poem the characters ritualistically declaim, is interwoven so thoughtfully and affectionately that I came to cherish it as my own. I often remark on how books, rather than films, can bring me to tears with their immediacy and intimacy—this is certainly one of those books.