LEIGH ROSE

Leigh Rose is the American Fiction Author of the ©”Legends on the Rise Novel Series” for which she received the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in Literature (2023).

Leigh’s genre is multi-dimensional; historic fiction, mystery, suspense et cetera, with distinctive characteristics, tropes, and conventions that define the story’s style, tone, and elements, reflecting themes of family, self-discovery, and legendary myths.

A prolific visual artist, genealogist, and scholar, Leigh’s talent and knowledge of cultures is highlighted in her novels. At an early age, she developed a talent for poetry and the visual arts and added feature-length writing through adulthood, winning many visual art and poetry awards as well as elected to university positions; Senator, Student Government (Art Department), President of the Student Art League, Publications Committee and Child Care Committee.

Leigh attended John Bowne High School, in Queens, New York, and her senior year at New York University. When Leigh was seventeen years old, she takes her ideas public by organizing human rights discussions, a peaceful Vietnam War protest, and environmental environmental protection awareness by backpacking throughout Canada. She considers Canada her home away from home.

Continuing her exploration of cultures, Leigh made three, road trips, across the U.S. before the age of eighteen, with residencies in adulthood in seven, U.S. states, while exploring Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean Islands.

LEIGH’S WRITING STUDIO

An independent (“indie”) author who self-publishes fiction, Leigh retains full control over the creative process, publishing rights, and marketing enterprise of her work. She is the creative director and designer of each book cover, formatting and editing high-quality books.

Leigh designs her narratives like a painting having been a professional visual artist for most of her life Leigh uses the blank page as her canvas.

Leigh designs her own books covers, Papier collé, French, for paper cuts, a collage technique in which paper is adhered to a flat mount.

Leigh earned an M.A at the University of North Carolina in December 2010, summa cum laude, where she studied creative writing, non-western literature and contemporary theories of religion.

HIGHER EDUCATION

M.A. University of North Carolina, Creative Writing. 2010. (3.85 GPA, Magna Cum Laude)

B.P.M. (Bachelor of Public Management) Florida Atlantic University, Arts Administration, Business Management, and Public Policy. 2003.

B.F.A. (Fine Art) University of North Florida, Painting. 2001.

LEIGH’S WRITING PROJECTS

©Double Orphan is a novel inspired by real events. Genre: Drama, Crime, Romance.

Double Orphan is a story about Angie Olivetti. Born and raised in North Beach, a small neighborhood, in San Francisco, California. A city with a long and divided history, at the age of eight Angie becomes an orphan having witnessed the murder of her parent’s by cartel, while the family is vacationing in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico. Angie is determined to bring the murderers to justice.

A fiancée engaged to Matteo Rios, the novel explores Mexico’s good, bad, and ugly side of human nature as Angie’s life becomes more complicated as she juggles her relationship and the couple’s busy careers. When Angie decides to follow in her Pulitzer Prize winning father’s footsteps, Uncle Johnny tries to dissuade her, but to no avail and after three years with the newspaper, they promote Angie to senior editor and international investigative journalist for the San Francisco Headline (SFH), in the newspaper’s U.S. & World Report division. Matteo and his his brother, Raul, own and operate, International Import and Export, a consulting firm that regulates illegal transfers of natural gas and crude oil from Mexico to the U.S. The couple takes their job very seriously.

It is now 2013 when Angie receives a phone call from Arturo Lopez, a former Mexican miner claiming the cartel are smuggling natural gas and crude oil over the U.S. border for a Texas refinery. A federal offence, Arturo is seeking asylum for his family of four for witness testimony.

Angie jumps on the whistleblowers claim and takes the story. With a team of journalists, Ice Shadow Wolves, and Federales, Angie’s team goes undercover to investigate the mining sting at Burgos Basin, in northeastern Mexico, and to rescue the Lopez family hiding out from cartel death threats in Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains.

However, when Angie’s Uncle Johnny shows up, things go south as he confronts whom he suspects murdered Angie’s father, his twin brother, Luke, and his wife, Sofia, as the incident brings to the forefront the harrowing secrets about what Angie had suspected all along.

©Murder at Sweet Life Inn is a fiction novel. A comedic-noir set in 2015, with flashbacks.

The novel opens in Princeton, New Jersey, during the early summer of 2015, when the Tasso/Forni family is set to celebrate the city’s “2015 Summer Solstice Warbler Festival.” A festival they celebrate since 1915, as a tribute and reverence to wood warblers as the Forni’s mastered the passerines birdcalls and songs, called “trilling,” one-hundred years ago.

Their love story with these tiny-feathered friends began in 1915, in the quaint mountain village of Campobasso, Italy, when WWI engulfs the city. The Forni’s transform their farmhouse into an agriturismo, a bed and breakfast for wayward soldiers they name, “Locanda Dolce Vita,” “Sweet Life Inn”

They learn the language of wood warblers, called “trilling,” to protect the village from the enemy. Warbler trills are rapid, high-pitched notes that crescendo into a single, continuous sound.

The novel opens when the Tasso/Forni families are celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the festival when they hear disturbing news. Luna, their cousin and keeper of “Sweet Life Inn” is suspect of a murder at the inn. The Tasso/Forni family travel from Princeton, New jersey, to Campobasso, Italy, to convince the Carabinieri (Italian police), their cousin is innocent, having found out that witnesses at the inn heard a tone-deaf songster at the scene of the crime and this fact should exonerate Luna since all Forni’s are skilled songsters (trillers).

While in Campobasso, the Carabinieri insist that if this is true that the entire village must take part in a “Trilling Contest” in order to prove they are correct. If this is so then the tone-deaf songster will be found out and the culprit of the murders. If not, Luna will go to prison.

©SPECIAL AGENT: Valentine Day is a spy thriller about Ned and Maggie Stiles. A couple that lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ned is a brilliant software engineer and Maggie a biochemist and Special Agent with the CIA who is catching a mole in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) during a joint counterintelligence operation with the United States. However, Maggie keeps her Special Agent, classified status a secret from Ned.

When the couple arrives at Moscow’s 2007 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, it is Valentine’s Day, when Maggie goes missing. Ned surmises his wife’s disappearance has everything to do with the classified project she has kept from him while working with the CIA, a project that had placed a wedge between them before she goes missing.

After a yearlong CIA investigation into Maggie’s disappearance, the agency tells Ned, “Maggie was kidnapped by Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives and deceased.”

Upset and angry, Ned buries his wife and the mother of their two boys, Darius and Lukas, without a body, but is haunted about the CIA’s inept investigation, leading Ned to think Maggie may still be alive. Therefore, he patents, AI-QFP, the Artificial Intelligence & Quantum Forensics Program he swears will find Maggie and bring her home.

When the CIA find out about Ned’s program he patents, they offer him their top position, Director of Artificial Intelligence. Feeling as though he has not choice if he wants to gain access into Maggie’s database, he joins the CIA to input its classical data into AI-QFP.

With his team of scientists, Ned discover Maggie is still alive, and for five years she has been on a mission in Moscow to intercept “The Wolf,” a CIA foreign asset gone rogue named, Dmitry Volkov, who wants to steal Maggie’s CIA classified project to terrorists. The biohybrid robot uses polymers, a synthetic collagen protein that replicates human muscle and bone with sensors that can mimic human behavior in a real-time environment. Maggie’s robot can understand, interpret, and interact with human-like precision. In the wrong hands, a fatality for the U.S. and allies.

LEIGH’S BACKGROUND

Leigh grew up in a multi-cultural/multi-lingual household. Leigh’s ancestry.com DNA testing from 1700 forward has 4 ancestral regions: 96% South Central Italy; Southeast Avellino & Southwest Foggia Provinces, Basilicata & South Campania Region, 3% Cyprian, 1% Estonia; Latvia, Belarus, and Lithuania, and 1% North Africa; Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara and Niger.

Leigh’s love of traveling and learning about culture is reflected in her writing with early interest beginning with genealogy as a young child. Leigh’s parents and grandparents were avid storytellers and retold their stories over their lifetime with Leigh.

In 1901, Leigh’s paternal grandparents, Martino Messano and Carmela Maria (Ventimiglia) Messano, immigrated to the United States from the Provence of Salerno, Italy. In the United States, they owned and operated a Mom and Pop Italian grocery store on Staten Island, where they lived, in New York. Leigh’s father, Andrew James Messano, was born in N.Y.C. and he worked as an account executive for Van Doran Street Laundry, a commercial laundry service for restaurateurs located within the five boroughs of New York City. It was owned, and operated by his in-laws, the Nittoli family. He was a WWII Navy veteran and stationed on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Hawaiian-Pacific.

Leigh’s maternal family, the Nittoli family, lived in New Jersey during the late nineteenth century. However, it was in 1913, when Leigh’s maternal grandfather, Antonio Amato Nittoli (baptized, Amato Maria Nittoli), immigrated to the United States during the Italian Diaspora. https://youtu.be/hwqzplK_gG0?si=mC_q_R1N4_nc8Mhw

In May 1915, and before establishing Van Doran Street Laundry, in Corona, Queens, Antonio lives and works in New Jersey as a supervisor for a Princeton, New Jersey, quarry, known for their famous, Princeton Brownstone. Still an Italian citizen, Antonio returns to Italy to serve in the Italian Army during WWI, under Italy’s conscription laws. Awarded the Italian Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Battle of the Isonzo (1915-1917), where he defended Italy against Austro-Hungarian Powers, alongside the Allied Powers of France, Britain, and Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_the_Isonzo

In 1930, Antonio becomes a U.S. citizen. One year later, in 1933, he fears for his family with the onset of WWII, so Antonio, brings the remainder of his family still living in Lioni, Italy, to the U.S. They include, Leigh’s mother, Antoinette, Leigh’s maternal grandmother, Victoria (DeConza) Nittoli, and the Nittoli’s remaining two sons, Daniel and Michael. Rocco and Angelo were already in the U.S. After gaining citizenship, Michael and Angelo serve in the U.S. Army during WWII. The second and third Nittoli cousins still living in Lioni, Italy, remain on the family’s large farm that produced goat’s milk for Lioni’s famous goat cheese industry. https://sistemairpinia.provincia.avellino.it/en/comuni/lioni

During WWI, Italy’s allegiance was to the Triple Entente and with the Treaty of London, the Allies promised Italy, lost Italian territories if Italy helped them win WWI. Italian citizens called the end to WWI, “A Mutilated Victory” because the Allies reneged on their promise. The reason why Italian citizens resisted joining the Allies during WWII. Italy becomes a republic on June 2, 1946, and celebrates their freedom on Festa Della Repubblica.  

In 1950, with a thriving business well under way, Antonio is knighted as Grand Official of the Order of Constantine of Antioch with (2) merits by Supreme Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, for his humanitarian deeds in Italy, and America after WWII.

With many philanthropic projects behind him, including President of Lioni’s Reconstruction Committee after WWII, Nittoli also builds a children’s orphanage, has his biography written and published in Lioni, A Benefactor: The Grande Ufficiale Antonio Nittoli.

At the age of sixteen, Leigh inherits her mother’s signed copy and translates the memoir from Italian to English, as a date for hire project by Susan Connors, of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In return, Leigh paints Susan’s portrait pictured below.

NITTOLI NOBLE COAT OF ARMS

Along with Leigh’s three older sisters, she is the armiger of the Nittoli Coat of Arms. In the field of heraldry, a coat of arms is designed and approved by a heraldic artist sanctioned by Italy. The Nittoli coat of arms includes symbols and colors designed to represent the history of the Nittoli family. Symbols on the Nittoli shield represent allegiance, nobility and honor: Yellow is gold for nobility, glory, high status, red for military strength and magnanimity, and blue for loyalty and truth.

The Nittoli shield depicts symbols with allegiance to King Charles of Anjou. Charles of Anjou was a member of the royal Capetian dynasty, and the founder of the House of Anjou-Sicily from 1266 to 1285. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_Anjou

Anjou’s label with four red bars is across the upper length of the Nittoli shield. Eagles represent allegiance to the Catholic Church, and fleur-de-lis loyalty to France.

The original Nittoli coat of arms is archived in Florence, Italy, and the second with Leigh Rose. Leigh’s armiger, pictured below, was passed down to the author by her mother, Antoinette Nittoli-Messano.

Leigh’s Armiger

Leigh is also related to the famous sculptor, Pietro (Peter) Nittoli, and a second, Antonio Nittoli, the 19th century nobleman and former President of the Italian Royal Institute of Medicine.

Pietro Nittoli, is a famous Baroque polychrome wood sculptor that worked during the mid-18th century. His sculptures are still admired today housed in many Southern Italy churches, especially in Campania, Italy, and cited by many scholars. One article is titled “Masterpieces of Middle Earth. Works of art from the Middle Ages to the Baroque.” An image of Saint Michael fighting Satan is pictured below:

Archangel Saint Michael Fighting Satan