Joe Fiorito

Last updated
Joe Fiorito
Born1948
Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ontario
OccupationNewspaper columnist
NationalityCanadian
Period1996-2017
GenreEssays
Notable works The Song Beneath the Ice
Notable awards

Joe Fiorito is a Canadian journalist and author.

Early life

Fiorito was born June 22, 1948, in Fort William, Ontario. He is third generation Italian-Canadian. His Italian family hails from Ripabottoni, in Molise. [1]

Contents

His father was a mailman and a musician. His mother was a waitress. He had three brothers. He wrote about his family life in the acclaimed memoir, "The Closer We Are To Dying". [2] [3]

Career

After working for several years in community development, he joined the CBC in 1980 as the manager of CFFB Radio in Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit. He then worked as a CBC Radio producer in Regina from 1985 to 1991. While at the CBC, he was president of his union local and in 1998 he was elected president of the National Radio Producers' Association.

He left the CBC to become a freelance journalist in Montreal, where he was a columnist for HOUR magazine, and the Montreal Gazette. Montreal Gazette . He won a National Newspaper Award for his Gazette columns in 1995.

He moved to Toronto in 1997, where he wrote city columns for the National Post , The Globe and Mail and "The Toronto Star". His columns focussed on the small details of daily life, with a particular focus on social housing, mental health issues, addictions, and poverty. His column about the eviction and subsequent death of a tenant in community housing led to a public inquiry and a series of reforms in the treatment of elderly tenants in community housing in Toronto.

Personal life

Joe Fiorito is married to Susan Mahoney. His son, Matt, is a punk musician in Vancouver.

Regarding his Italian roots, Fiorotto had this to say in an interview with italocanadese.com, "My heritage is a faded fresco; I’m third generation. But I have the legacy of the stories of the old days, and I am loyal to the plate on my table. What is clear and indelible, however, is the link to the village of my grandparents – Ripabottoni, in Molise, is the fountain of all of us with the last name Fiorito. Frankly, my last name tends to tie some people in knots, and so it is a test, but it is also an identifier: a guy in Milan, on hearing my name said, “Oh, a peasant.” Anywhere I am, I am never unaware of who I am." [1]

Awards and honours

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Urquhart</span> Canadian novelist and poet

Jane Urquhart, LL.D is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool, gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Ondaatje</span> Canadian novelist and poet

Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker.

George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austin Clarke (novelist)</span> Barbadian writer (1934–2016)

Austin Ardinel Chesterfield "Tom" Clarke,, was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and short story writer who was based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Among his notable books are novels such as The Polished Hoe (2002), memoirs including Membering (2015), and two collections of poetry, Where the Sun Shines Best (2013) and In Your Crib (2015).

Christopher Dewdney is a prize-winning Canadian poet and essayist. His poetry reflects his interest in natural history. His book Acquainted with the Night, an investigation into darkness was nominated for both the Charles Taylor Prize and the Governor General's Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irving Layton</span>

Irving Peter Layton, OC was a Romanian-born Canadian poet. He was known for his "tell it like it is" style which won him a wide following but also made him enemies. As T. Jacobs notes in his biography (2001), Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life:

Layton's work had provided the bolt of lightning that was needed to split open the thin skin of conservatism and complacency in the poetry scene of the preceding century, allowing modern poetry to expose previously unseen richness and depth.

Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, best known for his Western novel trilogy, The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing, and A Good Man set in the 19th-century American and Canadian West. Vanderhaeghe has won three Governor General's Awards for his fiction, one for his short story collection Man Descending in 1982, the second for his novel The Englishman's Boy in 1996, and the third for his short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories in 2015.

Jan Wong is a Canadian academic, journalist, and writer. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong's buffet in 1963, and earlier of the House of Wong which was the city's first Chinese restaurant to open outside Chinatown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Al Purdy</span>

Alfred Wellington Purdy was a 20th-century Canadian free verse poet. Purdy's writing career spanned fifty-six years. His works include thirty-nine books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence, in addition to his posthumous works. He has been called English Canada's "unofficial poet laureate" and "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."

Louis Dudek, was a Canadian poet, academic, and publisher known for his role in defining Modernism in poetry, and for his literary criticism. He was the author of over two dozen books. In A Digital History of Canadian Poetry, writer Heather Prycz said that "As a critic, teacher and theoretician, Dudek influenced the teaching of Canadian poetry in most [Canadian] schools and universities".

Antonia Zerbisias is a Canadian journalist associated with the Toronto Star from 1989 until she took early retirement from the paper on 31 October 2014. She has been a reporter and TV host for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as the Montreal correspondent for the trade paper, Variety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duncan Campbell Scott</span> Canadian poet and writer

Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian civil servant and poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets.

Ralph Barker Gustafson, CM was a Canadian poet and professor at Bishop's University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Hay (novelist)</span> Canadian novelist and short story writer (born 1951)

Elizabeth Grace Hay is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.

John Steffler is a Canadian poet and novelist. He served as Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alison Pick</span> Canadian writer (born 1975)

Alison Pick is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her Booker Prize-nominated novel Far to Go, and was a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer in Canada under 35.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonard Cohen</span> Canadian singer-songwriter and poet (1934–2016)

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011 he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.

Joseph Rosenblatt was a Canadian poet who lived in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He was also a talented artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets’ books of poetry."

The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were a Canadian program of literary awards, managed, produced and presented annually by the Koffler Centre of the Arts to works judged to be the year's best works of literature by Jewish Canadian writers or on Jewish cultural and historical topics.

Raymond Filip is a Lithuanian-Canadian poet and writer who was born in a displaced persons camp in Lübeck, Germany after World War II. He teaches in the English department at John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec.

References

  1. 1 2 "Un Momento with Joe Fiorito". italocanadese.com. 2021-12-04. Retrieved 2023-05-03.
  2. Maureen O'Connor (23 August 2011). Life Stories: A Guide to Reading Interests in Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Diaries. ABC-CLIO. pp. 294–. ISBN   978-1-61069-146-8.
  3. "Sometimes you have to go home again: Fiorito | the Star". Toronto Star . 11 December 2014.
  4. Orest Stocco (3 January 2015). The Sum of All Spiritual Paths. Lulu.com. pp. 120–. ISBN   978-1-926442-02-0.
  5. The Canadian forum. Canadian Forum,Limited. March 1999. p. 45.
  6. F & L Primo. F.L. Primo, Incorporated. 2003. p. 18.