By Marisa Porto

Award-winning Newport News poet Ann Falcone Shalaski was born in Connecticut and "nurtured by a warm, loving, and at times loud Italian family," according to her website.

Her work has been published in The Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Main Channel Voices, and other publications.

Shalaski's second and newest book of poems, "Without Pretense," is dedicated to her parents, Fred and Seraphina Falcone. It is about her every day experiences from childhood as an Italian-American through midlife as a woman and mother, to poems that chronicle process of growing older.

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Source: http://www.dailypress.com