Donna Matthews
Writing the I Veri historical-crime series as DM Matthews
Donna Matthews writes historical fiction and memoir rooted in Sicily and the immigrant experience — stories of what families keep, what they are forced to bury, and the patient, generation-spanning work of setting it right.
The granddaughter of a Sicilian who came through Ellis Island in 1919, she grew up Italian-American in Auburn, in Upstate New York, and has lived in the United Kingdom for the past twenty-six years — a life spent, like the books, on both shores of the same crossing. That inheritance runs through everything she writes: the old country and the new, what a family holds onto and what it hides, and the long memory of people who refuse to look away.
Her memoir, One Woman’s View: A Life Lived Loudly, tells her own story; its companion novel, The Beads He Carried, imagines her grandfather’s crossing from the inside. Both are published under her own name.
Writing as DM Matthews, she is the author of the I Veri series — a multigenerational historical-crime saga that begins in 1870s Sicily and follows one woman’s thirty-year reckoning across two continents. It opens with The Gabellotto’s Daughter and continues in The Last Name.
She publishes under the Cassaro Publishing imprint.
Mostly I write to keep people at the table a little longer — the ones who kept their heads down, got on with it, and were rarely asked what any of it was like. On the page I get to sit them back down and finally listen.
— Donna Matthews
Donna Matthews 