Conditions Governing Use

There are no restrictions

Immediate Source of Acquisition

This collection is a gift from the estate of Vanna Bonta (through Michelle Green) to the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia on 2015 January 22, 2015

Biographical / Historical

Vanna Bonta was an Italian-American writer, poet, actress, and inventor. She wrote "Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel" in 1995 which was characterized by the American Library Association as an "auspicious, genre-bending parable". Publishers Weekly described the debut work as running the gamut of particularly moving to quirky and hilarious satire, with "asides about bathtub books, self-doubt tapes and other foibles." Bonta invented the 2suit, a flight garment designed to facilitate human intimacy and stability in outerspace. The spacesuit was featured on The Universe television series, including an episode titled, "Sex in Space" that aired in 2009 on the History Channel. From 2007-09, she participated in the annual Lunar Lander Challenge, a competition sponsored by NASA and Northrop Grumman to commercially build a lightweight spacecraft for landing on the moon. Bonta was a team member of BonNovA. As creative director, Bonta designed a pressure-release device for high-combustion engines. On November 13, 2013, a haiku by Bonta was one of 1,100 haiku launched from Cape Canaveral on the NASA spacecraft MAVEN to Mars

As an actress, Bonta played "Zed's Queen" in The Beastmaster. She performed primarily as a voice talent on a roster of feature films, such as Disney's Beauty and the Beast, as well as on television.

Taken in part from Wikipedia.

Scope and Contents

This collection of Vanna Bonta's papers consists of about one hundred items, one half-size document box, and .25 cubic feet, and contains articles about and by Vanna Bonta, certificates, letters from Pearl S. Buck, the Queen of Thailand, Barbara Bush, George W. H. Bush, Gerald Ford, Phyllis Diller, and George Burns. There are also programs, book signing advertisements,cartoons, illustrations, writings, and a DVD "What Goes Up".

Arrangement

This collection is arranged by subject matter