Joseph Pivato

Joseph Pivato (born February 1946, Italy) is a Canadian writer and academic who first established the critical recognition of Italian-Canadian literature and changed perceptions of Canadian writing.

He was born Giuseppe Pivato in Tezze sul Brenta, a town about 40 km north of Venice, Italy. His mother, Meri Sabucco, was from Udine in the Friuli region east of Venice. This Italian origin was to have a profound influence on his whole life and career as a writer, researcher and academic. The family emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in 1952 where the Catholic nuns changed his name to Joseph. He attended St. Michael's College School, an academic high school for boys, where he studied languages and literature. He enrolled at York University where he studied with modernist scholar, D.E.S. Maxwell, feminist and medievalist, Beryl Rowland, Canadian writer, Irving Layton, met poet/professor Miriam Waddington, French poet Hedi Bouraoui and poet-critic, Eli Mandel. With D.E.S. Maxwell he enrolled in the first course in African Literature (1969). In the summers he worked with Italian bricklayers to help pay for his university fees. In 1968 he founded and edited the first literary magazine at York, Voodoo Poetry at Vanier College. In 1970 he earned a B.A. (Combined Honours, English and French) from York and moved to Edmonton to study comparative literature at the University of Alberta. His 1971 M.A. thesis was on Dante and Baudelaire. There he studied with E.D. Blodgett a writer and academic who was his advisor for his Ph.D. thesis on hermetic poetry. At the University of Alberta he also met Canadian writers Henry Kreisel and Sheila Watson and began to work on Canadian authors publishing his first critical essay in Canadian Literature (1973, editor George Woodcock) while he was still a graduate student. By the end of his doctoral program (1977) he began to work at the newly established Athabasca University, a distance education institution modeled after the British Open University. At Athabasca he helped to develop the first courses in English literature, Canadian literature, comparative literature and theory. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1986. He was founding president of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers(1986) which advances the work of these ethnic minority authors through critical publications, biennial conferences, book launches and literary readings across Canada and in Italy. At Athabasca Pivato was Chair of the Centre for Language and Literature on three separate occasions and developed the first courses in creative writing. In 2010 he was founding professor of the new M.A. in Literary Studies which is part of the MA-IS program. He is married to Alberta psychologist, writer, academic and disabilities advocate Dr. Emma Pivato. Their children include Dr. Marcus J. Pivato, Prof. of Economics, University of Cergy-Potoise (Paris,France), and Juliana Pivato, Artist and Academic in Toronto. Emma Pivato's novels include Blind Sight Solution (Chicago: Cozy Cat Press, 2013) The Crooked Knife (2014) Roscoe's Revenge (2014) Jessie Knows (2015) Murder on Highway 2 (2016) and Deadly Care (2016). Since July, 2015, he has been Professor Emeritus at Athabasca University.

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