John Champagne (1960) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After attending three different undergraduate schools, he finally finished his degree and is now a proud graduate of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program, where he studied with Louise DeSalvo and Audre Lorde and completed his first novel The Blue Lady’s Hands (Lyle Stuart, 1988). He subsequently received an MA in Film Studies from New York University and a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.

Champagne’s work traverses a variety of genres and fields, including Italian studies, fiction, literary nonfiction, film, cultural criticism, and poetry. Dividing his time between Erie, Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of English at Penn State, and Perugia, Italy, he is married to Richard Krone. Champagne’s other books include When the Parrot Boys Sings (Meadowlands, 1990); The Ethics of Marginality, A New Approach to Gay Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 1995); Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (Routledge, 2012); Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave, 2015); Queer Ventennio, Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (Peter Lang, 2019). His personal essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals: most recently Diversity in Italian Studies (John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2021). Champagne was the 2018-19 Penn State Laureate.