RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : 'Bronx Butch' Memoirist & Performance Artist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.

Rag Radio podcast:
'Bronx Butch' memoirist & performance
artist, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

“Annie Lanzillotto, the bard of Bronx Italian butch, is an American original, a performance artist and cultural anthropologist whose work is unique... an astonishing writer possessed of an utterly inimitable voice." -- Author John Gennari

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2013

Author, poet, and performance artist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 29, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Annie Rachele Lanzillotto here:


Annie Lanzillotto is an Italian-American lesbian memoirist, poet, performance artist, singer, and songwriter who lives in New York. She is the author of L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir, published in 2013 by the State University of New York Press.

On Rag Radio Lanzillotto discusses her rich and multi-faceted life and art. She talks about and reads from her lusty, wise, and very witty memoir, which deals with a range of issues including her Italian-American upbringing, her father's PTSD and his physical abuse of her mother; her two bouts with cancer, and her coming to terms with her sexuality.

An American original.

As author John Gennari says, Annie's memoir "indelibly portrays the iconic Italian American spaces of kitchen, stoop, sidewalk, and street; the body as a site of humor and tragedy; and, above all, the family war zone as an uncanny intermingle of poignancy and brutality."

Annie Lanzillotto was born and raised in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx, and in Yonkers, New York, of Barese heritage. She received a B.A. with honors in medical anthropology from Brown University and an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2012, she received a Franklin Furnace Archive Inc. Performance Commission and a Petracca Award in Poetry from Philadelphia Poets, and has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Program, Dancing In the Streets, and the Puffin Foundation.

Lanzillotto is also the author of a book of poetry, Schistsong, and teaches master classes in solo performance for the Acting Apprentice Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. She was selected as one of "200 essential New Yorkers" by The New York Times for her performance and installation at the 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She is included in Marquis Who's Who of American Women.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.
Friday, April 19: Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.

The Rag Blog