In September 2007, Christine Ristaino was attacked in a store parking lot while her three- and five-year-old children watched. In All the Silent Spaces, Ristaino shares what it felt like to be an ordinary person confronted with an extraordinary event?a woman trying to deal with acute trauma even as she went on with her everyday life, working at a university and parenting two children with her husband. She not only narrates how this event changed her but also tells how looking at the event through both the reactions of her community and her own sensibility allowed her to finally face two other violent episodes she had previously experienced. As new memories surfaced after the attack, it took everything in Ristaino's power to not let catastrophe unravel the precarious threads holding everything together. Moving between the greater issues associated with violence and the personal voyage of overcoming grief, All the Silent Spaces is about letting go of what you think you know in order to rebuild.

Christine Ristaino teaches Italian and is the faculty advisor for a number of programs related to social justice at Emory University. She has coauthored an academic publication titled Lucrezia Marinella and the "Querelle des Femmes" in Seventeenth-Century Italy and the first edition of a book series, The Italian Virtual Class. Ristaino specializes in Italian language pedagogy, language teaching, cultural acquisition, community engaged learning, and Italian memoir. She writes and publishes articles and op-eds on overcoming violence, having difficult conversations, and equity.