Dian Cunningham Parrotta was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She lives in Falls Church City, Virginia, where she is employed at Fairfax County Public schools and the Northern Virginia Literacy Council. I Brake for Clouds is her fourth poetry book, which will be published in 2020 soon after having received her MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University in 2019. She dreams to retire to Europe and travel on her Irish passport within the next year to finally roam around her beloved grandfather’s winding rivers and green landscapes of his Eire, Republic of Ireland, and to of course go over to Naples, Italy, where her Great-Grandma Mary Trotta, used to live. Then that is not all! This poet wishes to drop in on her two sons, who live and work in Prague and Madrid, respectively.
“A champion of child-like wonder, Dian Parrotta, in I Brake for Clouds, fashions poems out of thin air. Metaphors, fresh and lucid, pop and delight: clouds are fish scales, ziggurats, and nosegays. Parrotta’s imagination ranges from oceans filled with eons-old trilobites to lengths of modern conduit over our ‘shared sky.’ She revels in the reveal of beauty and danger that clouds—those co-conspirators of weather—can bring. Her verse flows, rich with heady diction, and the overall effect feels otherworldly. A bold collection of new work. Brava!”
—Terri White, author of “To Tell” and other short stories