BOOK LAUNCH CELEBRATION for Janine Molinaro,

Professor and Chair, English Department at La Roche College

— with a special appearance by Sam Hazo —

RSVP by emailing here

Order Before the Pen Runs Dry here. (Please note: while the book order page lists the book as a hardback, it is a paperback. We are working with the publisher to fix this.)

Advanced praise for Before the Pen Runs Dry:

This wonderful biography by Janine Molinaro takes the ingenious step of focusing on carefully selected poems and then providing backstories and details. We learn of Sam’s family origins and Lebanese heritage, his scholarship to Notre Dame and inspirational professors, his time in the Marines, and his academic career of 43 years as a professor at Duquesne University. He was founder and director of the International Poetry Forum and a great promoter of the city of Pittsburgh. His wife Mary Anne and his son Sam Robert were the loves of his life. Molinaro captures well the availability of Sam’s poetry and prose as he takes up important issues like love, war, time, chance, and silence. The greatest tribute I can pay to this creative and well-developed biography is that Molinaro’s prose resembles Hazo’s in its sharpness, insight, and manageable length.

--Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

Sam Hazo is one of the most endearingly autobiographical of our major poets. By melding biography with a generous selection of his poems, Janine Molinaro shows us how Hazo transmuted the rich loom of his life into poems that shimmer and dazzle while addressing in clear, unornamented language the secret ways of mind and heart. I know of no other literary biography quite like this one. It is a marvelously enjoyable introduction to a master of many literary genres, a poet whose public recitations charm audiences into rapt silence. This is not the man in full, but it is the man in round. All that is missing is the sound of his resonant, earthenware voice.

--Kenneth L. Woodward, former Religion Editor of Newsweek and author, most recently, of Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump