Gail Reitano was born and raised in the southern New Jersey Pine Barrens and currently lives on the West Coast, north of San Francisco. Her work includes fiction, memoir, and the personal essay, and has appeared in the anthology Songs of Ourselves: America's Interior Landscape, Glimmer Train Press, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Ovunque Siamo: New Italian American Writing, among others. ITALIAN LOVE CAKE (Bordighera Press, 2021) is her first novel.