Grace DiSanto

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Grace DiSanto (1924–1993) was an American journalist and poet based in North Carolina. Born Grace Johanne DeMarco in Derby, Connecticut, she moved to North Carolina in 1961 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English, summa cum laude, from Belmont Abbey College. She spent about ten years as a reporter, drama critic, and feature writer for the Australian Associated Press in New York City, the Ansonia Sentinel in Connecticut, and the Sunday Herald in New Haven.

DiSanto published more than 180 poems in journals and anthologies, including Southern Poetry Review and Yale Literary Magazine. Her first poetry collection, The Eye is Single (1981), won the 1982 Oscar Arnold Young Memorial Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and she also received the 1982 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize for "At Grandfather Mountain II." She taught poetry at Western Piedmont Community College and participated in Mecklenburg County’s Poetry in the Schools program.

She belonged to several literary groups, including the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Poetry Council of North Carolina, the New York Poetry Forum, and Centro Studi Scamb Internationale in Rome. DiSanto married Frank M. DiSanto and had a son and two daughters. She died on June 4, 1993, at her home in Morganton, North Carolina, after a long illness. Her papers are held at Western Piedmont Community College and in the Southern Appalachian Writers Collection at the Asheville Art Museum, UNC. She corresponded with poet M. Bernetta Quinn.