Professor Emeritus Joseph Tusiani speaks of his teaching and career at Lehman College.  Professor  Tusiani was honored with the Distinguished Literature Award at the Lehman College Awards Dinner on October 30, 2015.

About Joseph Tusiani

Joseph Tusiani, Lehman College professor emeritus of languages and literatures and an acclaimed poet, translator and novelist, died April 11, 2020. He was 96.

Tusiani, who retired from Lehman in 1983, was named New York State Poet Laureate Emeritus by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in 2016, in recognition of his achievements in American and Italian literature. He published in five languages: Italian, English, Latin, Spanish, and Gargano (a dialect of the Apulia region of Italy, where he was born).

Professor Tusiani earned his Ph.D. in Letters from the University of Naples in 1947. The following year, he emigrated to the United States, where he and his family settled in the Arthur Avenue section of the Bronx. He embarked on a successful teaching career, first at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and then at Lehman College, from which he retired in 1983.

Tusiani took his role as an educator seriously—and in return was beloved by students and colleagues.

Vincent Zucchetto, a retired Lehman staff member, had also been Tusiani’s student. He recalled that experience at the 2015 Lehman College Foundation Awards Dinner, at which Tusiani was honored with a Distinguished Accomplishment in Literature award.

“His classes were always full to capacity, even though you had to work hard to earn your grade,” Zucchetto said. “Very rarely would someone be absent. To hear him lecture was a great treat…there was something in his presentation that elevated that experience to something ethereal.”

Vincent Zucchetto (class of 1975)

In a speech at Lehman’s 2018 commencement, alumnus, writer and CUNY Distinguished Professor Andre Aciman described how Tusiani inspired him as a student struggling to make ends meet.

“I went to the Bronx every day on the 4 train. I was working three jobs,” he said. “It was so pedestrian and plodding; everything about me was so plebeian. Yet I’d get to the Bronx and here we were—Tusiani and I—two minds totally committed to what was timeless, to what was great.”

Andre Aciman (class of 1973)

In addition to his poetry, Tusiani published numerous translations, a novel, and a three-volume autobiography. In 2011, he was the subject of the documentary “Finding Joseph Tusiani: The Poet of Two Lands.”

As a writer and educator, was recognized internationally for his work. In 1956, he was the first American to receive the Greenwood Prize of the Poetry Society of England. In 1986, The American Association of Teachers of Italian nominated him as the first recipient of the AATI Distinguished Service Award. In 2007, he was presented with the Keys to the City of Florence for his contributions to the English-speaking world’s knowledge of Florentine poets from Dante and Boccaccio to Petrarch and Machiavelli.

The Professor Joseph Tusiani Scholarship, named in his honor, has supported Lehman students with an interest in Italian-American culture.

-Text adapted from In Memoriam: Poet and Lehman Professor Emeritus Joseph Tusiani by Lisa Hirschfield, Lehman College.