Date of Birth: 
About Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
- Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (born July 5, 1949) is an Italian-Canadian poet.
- In 2005 he became the second Poet Laureate of Toronto. Born in Arezzo, Italy, his family immigrated to Canada in 1952.
- Di Cicco was brought up in several North American cities, among them Baltimore, Maryland, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario.
- In the early 1970s he attended the University of Toronto.
- While working part-time as a bartender at the university, he began to publish poems in little magazines.
- He has since written 13 books of poetry and in 1978 edited a volume of verse by Italian-Canadian poets, Roman Candles which became a seminal volume for the birth of Italian-Canadian literature. His poems, consisting of deep images in stanzas of free verse - with lines consisting of irregular numbers of syllables and (hypothetical) feet - often referred to di Cicco's immigrant and Italian-family experiences.
- In books like Flying Deeper Into the Century (1982) and The Tough Romance (1979) he communicated a modern, sensitive awareness of the confusing welter of 20th-century life.
- Di Cicco's unmetrical but imagistic lines flowed on, often with cumulative power, to release their tension at the end of their stanzas. Di Cicco gradually felt called to a Catholic religious life.
- Reducing his output of verse, he spent a period in an Augustinian monastery north of Toronto.
- Di Cicco then undertook religious studies and became a friar with a parish in Brampton, Ontario.
- In the 1990s he resumed writing and publishing poems, producing a selected volume and several others.
- In 2005, he was chosen Poet Laureate of Toronto; he published a poem weekly in The Toronto Star Sunday newspaper.
- In 2004-5 he taught at the University of Toronto.
- The writer and critic Joseph Pivato edited, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco: Essays on His Works (2011), an important analysis of his poetry. His latest book (2018) is entitled Wishipedia.
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