Category Archives: Profile

Nicola Orichuia: Bringing Italian Literature to Boston’s North End

Profile

I AM Books is housed in a four story red brick building in a quaint area of Boston’s North End, the epicenter of Italian culture in Boston. Inside, the store is small, taking up the basement and ground floor of the building, with the basement level devoted to offices and overstock, and the ground floor as the actual sales floor. The bookcase greeting customers at the entrance contains books written in English that take place in Italy, and as one walks deeper there is an English section, a bilingual section, a grouping of works by Italian authors translated into English, and Italian authors in Italian—many of the most prolific authors get an entire shelf to themselves, including Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Andrea Camillieri, and Dante Alighieri. The children’s section has books in both languages, including English classics such as Harry Potter and Dr. Seuss in Italian, as well as Italian classics.

Nicola Orichuia is the young, charming co-founder of the store, so enthusiastic that he apologized for talking too much during our conversation. A journalist originally, Nicola moved to the United States from Italy in 2008 and from Chicago to Boston in 2010. Sitting with me on a small couch tucked between bookcases in the store, he told me that before opening I AM Books, he had never worked in retail or the book industry. During his first years in the United States, he was a founder and journalist of an Italian American online and print magazine, but when a friend was leaving a storefront in the North End, Nicola felt called to put a business there. At first, he admits that he didn’t even know what he wanted to do with the space, but eventually his passion for books gave him the idea for the bookstore, and four months later, the store opened. Nicola firmly believes that every community needs and deserves its own bookstore, and since the North end was without a bookstore at the time, he saw this storefront opening up as the perfect way to fill that void. He had never dreamed of opening a bookstore; the opportunity simply fell into his lap, and he took it.

Having had no experience in the book industry or even in retail, he faced a steep learning curve to get a bookstore on its feet, but with his passion for books and community building, it came together. This passion was evident throughout our conversation in his bright eyes and long answers to my queries. He apologized more than once for talking too much, but to me it was simply clear how much he cares about what he’s doing.

Central to Nicola’s passion for the store is his commitment to its mission. I AM Books wants to be more than “just” a bookstore. Nicola views it as both a bookstore a cultural hub. Critical functions of the store, he feels, are providing opportunities for others, including first time and self-published authors; opening doors and opportunities for everyone; giving people a physical space to come together and meet. Nicola is firm in his conviction that bookstores are vital to a community because they offer a physical space that brings people together. He also stressed the store’s importance as an Italian-American space—blending both cultures together. Italian-American culture is a unique culture with its own identity separate from Italian culture itself, and the store tries to maintain a balance between the two. There is an Italian bookstore in San Francisco that sells purely Italian books, but I AM Books is not that—and it doesn’t want to be. Nicola told me that he believes bookstores allow people to get a deeper understanding of who they are, where they come from, and where they’re going.The Italian angle of his store thus impacts people’s perceptions of themselves in a unique way. He loves getting to know customers, new and regulars, and he loves the way the community has welcomed the store. The growth of the store and the expansion of its community, the regulars who stop by to say hi, the Italian literature festival he will be organizing for the second time this year—all of it makes Nicola feel like he is succeeding at his job.

When asked what a bookstore needs to be successful today, Nicola told me that nothing is more important than having a strong soul and identity. That’s the key, and without it, customers will know there’s something off. He told me that ultimately, if you build it, they will come, as long as you understand and honor your mission. There are always challenges, and no one goes into the bookselling industry to “get rich,” but if customers leave satisfied and you’re carrying out your mission, you are succeeding. And I AM Books certainly is.

Dorothy Roberts and Her Fight for Social Justice

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Dorothy Roberts is George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She has gained international recognition as a scholar, focusing on the areas of reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Recently she visited Wellesley College as their 2019 Betsy Wood Knapp ‘64 speaker to discuss issues involving race-based medicine.

Roberts grew up wanting to become an anthropologist. Her father, an anthropology professor, and her mother, who gave up on her anthropology PhD when she gave birth to Roberts, encouraged her from a young age to enter academia. But during her undergraduate senior year at Yale, she suddenly decided to apply for law school. “I wanted to do something more concrete in terms of advocating for social justice and I didn’t really have any role models, as anthropology professors who did that. And so I switched gears and turned from anthropology to law and went to law school.”  In 1980 she graduated with a JD from Harvard. After practicing law for a number of years, she realized that her true passion lay elsewhere: in academic teaching, writing, and research of academia.

“ I figured out that I could be a social justice advocate while doing those things in academia so I became a law professor, and have always tried to merge my interests in social justice with the work of a professor in academia.”

Now as a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, she continues her work in social justice through her writing, sitting on boards, and advocating for others. She started out focusing on reproductive health, which led to her first scholarly article “Contesting the Prosecutions of Black Women Who Use Drugs During Pregnancy”. “That topic lead me to think about multiple ways racism and sexism are intertwined in the regulation of women’s childbearing, especially black women’s childbearing” says Roberts. Her book, Killing the Black Body, traces the restrictive and oppressive reproductive methods used to control black women’s childbearing from the era of slavery to today. While following the stories of black women’s childbearing Roberts discovered that newborns of black women who used drugs during pregnancy were immediately placed in foster care. This lead her to examining the child welfare system. In this area she noticed the same systematic black oppression she encountered in reproductive health. “As I start to understand it not as a system that benevolently saves children but as a system that is very oppressive and rife with racial discrimination, I decided to write a book on that topic.” That book, Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare, is an account linking the origins and impact of the unequal representation of black children in the child welfare system to racial injustice. Roberts identified both these areas of reproductive justice and child welfare as having systems rooted in the devaluing black women’s childbearing – first punishing black women for having children, then taking them away.

“Even though my conclusions are sometimes depressing, I think ‘oh, all these forms of oppression work together in these particular ways’. I still […] get satisfaction out of helping to figure out how oppression works. The reason I get satisfaction out of it is not just because it’s an intellectual exercise, but because I work with people who are parts of movements to end it.”

Roberts is affiliated both with a national panel for foster care reform in Washington state, and with the Standards Working Group for stem cell research in California. The intersectionality of the diverse work she does can appear daunting for those wanting to follow in her footsteps.  But her advice to younger generations looking to change systemic injustice is to follow their passion.

“[…] the silver lining of the fact that there’s so much wrong is that there’s so much you can do! And there’s such a variety of things you can do. […] Pick a field that you enjoy working in and then find people of like mind you can work with. […] I think that a student graduating from college can find their way into one of those movements. Or find their way in whatever they want to do into collaborating with a movement that is working towards change in an area they’re particularly interested in, or feel passionate about.”