Author Joseph Bathanti’s East Liberty

“As with Joyce’s Dublin, place isn’t simply geographical–it is inherent in the working-class culture in which characters live. The tension remains across stories because it is, at root, based in economics and class status.”

by Donna Wojnar Dzurilla

Until I read Joseph Bathanti’s novel, East Liberty (Banks Channel Books, 2001) I never thought much of Negley Run Boulevard or the Meadow Street Bridge that ran above it– except that it was a shortcut to get a Lawrenceville kid from Stanton Avenue down to Washington Boulevard. Under the bridge crossing the Run was once the Hollow, a place described by Bathanti in his novel as, “the gulf between the promontories through which the boulevard gashes is the demilitarized zone for East Liberty’s … race wars … the forbidden place … last pittance of wilderness, a few unclaimed acres in the heart of the neighborhood.” Bathanti himself grew up in and around the Hollow and his novel takes place there in the early 1960s, before failed urban renewal projects, blight, and eventual gentrification created the East Liberty of today. It was an East Liberty of Italian immigrants, African Americans and the working class.

Bathanti graduated from Central Catholic High School, the all-boys high school in Oakland that my father, uncles and brother graduated from. He left Pittsburgh in his early twenties to become a VISTA volunteer in the North Carolina prison system. He married a fellow volunteer, his beloved wife Joan, and remained in the South where he was named the seventh poet laureate of the state of North Carolina (2012), and recipient of The Order of The Long Leaf Pine and the 2016 North Carolina Award in Literature. In 2024, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame alongside such notable writers as Maya Angelou, Charles Frazier and Thomas Wolfe. His award-winning 2022 poetry collection, Light at the Seam (LSU Press), explores the effects of mountain-top removal in the coal-mining region of Appalachia. His collection Concertina (Mercer University Press, 2013) focuses on his experiences working in the North Carolina prison system, but his Italian Catholic roots remain evident. In his essay collection, Half of What I Say is Meaningless (Mercer University Press, 2014) he interrogates his experiences with the draft and the Vietnam War just prior to the official end in January 1973. The title essay shares insight into the reasons for his commitment to work with Vietnam veterans as his poet laureate project, work which he continues today.

I was puzzled at first when my graduate program director assured me my first residency mentor would be a perfect fit—Bathanti held an endowed chair at Appalachian State University and taught in Carlow University’s low-residency creative writing graduate program that I’d been accepted into. I wasn’t sure what we’d have in common other than I’d left Pittsburgh for work – twice – once for the South and once to the Pennsylvania mountains – but I always returned.

On a frigid January morning in 2019, I brought a short story to my first graduate writing workshop which included a description of a steelworker’s drive across the Rankin Bridge to his shift at U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock. As I looked around the room at my cohort, I wondered if any really understood the industry’s enmeshed relationship with the culture of Pittsburgh’s steelworkers’ families. How can one understand that simply by seeing the rusted industrial artifacts around town which offer great backgrounds for selfies? I worry that Pittsburgh’s history of labor movements and unions created by hardworking immigrants and migrants will be lost. The drafty second floor workshop classroom we occupied, complete with heavily varnished dark wainscotting and a set of ancient parchment maps that hung like window blinds above the chalkboard, could substitute for any of my Catholic grade school classrooms. The mid-20th century modern crucifix above the door cinched the deal.

It came time to discuss my story and a fellow student gently asked why E.T., Spielberg’s alien, appeared. Bathanti looked at me with an odd smile, he understood the reference to E.T. immediately but recognized a teaching moment. As a beginning writer, I had to learn to consider my audience. Older, native Pittsburghers know what E.T. refers to—simply short-hand for the Edgar Thompson Works. The meaning is significant to me, but it will mean nothing if the reader doesn’t share that meaning.

Bathanti’s father was a union steelworker at Edgar Thomson, his mother a union seamstress, both children of Italian immigrants; he grew up in East Liberty. I come from a working class, pro-union family; Irish and Polish immigrants who made their way to Pittsburgh at the turn of the 20^th century, worked in the mills and settled in Lawrenceville and Sharpsburg. One of my uncles worked as a steward for the Amalgamated Meatcutters Union (now the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union), another went to jail during the 1957 Pittsburgh trolley operators union strike for strike-related activities. My husband is a retired union steelworker, a former grievance man and contract negotiator for his local.

I could work with Bathanti—he became my thesis director—not only because of his background, but because of what I discovered in his work, particularly his fiction.

In fiction, Bathanti recreates the Pittsburgh he grew up in; it is one I recognize, a Pittsburgh that is mostly gone. After writing the epic Ulysses, James Joyce said, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Fiction can paint a map of a place and provide a window into that culture and people. Bathanti’s fiction captures the lives of working-class families in Pittsburgh in the 1950s through the 1970s, the lives of people who are first- and second-generation Americans. Like Joyce’s Dublin, one could reconstruct a map of mid-20^th century East Liberty from Bathanti’s writing.

“Place has always been for me two places: the moment in which, with my feet on a particular turf, I’m breathing; and also that other life I’ve banked like a sheltered bank account in Pittsburgh,” he said about setting so much of his writing in Pittsburgh. He says he writes to be a better person and feels writers have an obligation, like physicians, to do no harm.

Bathanti finds power in education, in reading and writing. Much of the work he did inside the prison system was teaching incarcerated people to read and write, to find their way through literature and their own voices. To Bathanti, these are markers of intellectual and emotional growth, as well as societal change.

”Using both terms (restorative and social justice) is abiding by shared humanity as our barometer for how we treat people–everyone should have the same opportunities regardless of wealth and education and community standing, color, sexual preferences – rather than class status,” he said.

Issues like immigration, racism, and abortion are not theoretical concepts. As people look for ways to address the injustices perpetrated by the current administration and the reversal of decades of social change, creative works like Bathanti’s provide the means to document and preserve history while engaging readers—be it reading for academic and historical purposes or for entertainment and leisure.

Today, remnants of mills survive. The massive Gantry crane and twelve imposing 130 foot brick smokestacks welcome shoppers to the Waterfront shopping complex, where once stood the U.S. Steel Homestead Works. The historical Pump House, site of the Battle of Homestead, a pivotal moment in the history of labor unions in America, anchors another corner of that complex. Further upriver, the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area preserves the historic Carrie Furnaces. Beyond that, the Edgar Thomson Works remains the largest producer of steel in the region and runs round the clock. The sprawling mill overshadows the town of Braddock and dominates that side of the river. Unnatural clouds of white smoke form out of the stacks, the intermittent flares of gas burn-off, and clanging sounds of industry are constant in that end of the Mon (Monongahela) Valley. U.S. Steel reports that 900 workers are employed there today, a fraction of the reported 340,498 employees who worked the mill in 1948. Sprung up around that massive employer are towns and neighborhoods, once filled with businesses that supported the needs of those workers, many of whom had come from Europe for the promise of a better life in the United States. The Pennsylvania Railroad established the East Liberty Station in the 1850’s and it quickly became a gateway for immigrants searching for industrial and manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh. The surrounding neighborhoods became home to a diverse set of ethnicities including Italians, Jews, African Americans, Germans, Irish, and Greeks.

In order to understand how migrants and immigrants came to settle in different Pittsburgh neighborhoods, I spoke with Ron Baraff, Director of Historic Resources and Facilities at Rivers of Steel.

“In the first part of the 20th century, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, along with African Americans (starting in the 1920s into 30s with the Great Migration from the American South), were attracted to the region by the promise of jobs in the steel industry. Unlike earlier immigrant groups from more industrialized Northern European countries (such as Germans, Scotch-Irish, and English), these new arrivals often lacked specific industrial skills. Instead, they brought physical strength and a willingness to work long hours for low wages, viewing this as a chance to pursue the American dream and improve their families’ lives. Upon arrival, these groups frequently settled in ethnic enclaves—sometimes by choice, but often due to external pressures. Employment in the mills was frequently secured through family or ethnic connections, and workers tended to be grouped by ethnicity on the job. This pattern reinforced community bonds but also perpetuated divisions,” Baraff continued on to say that many African American workers migrated here, having been recruited from the Jim Crow South by company agents who promised good wages.

“However, they faced significant barriers to advancement within the mills, with little hope of rising above the most difficult and dangerous jobs. This was not accidental; companies deliberately maintained divisions among workers to prevent collective action or labor unrest.

Corporations fostered these divisions by keeping workers ‘in their place,’ ” Baraff said.

Bathanti’s novel, East Liberty, introduces Bobby Renzo, five years old, and his unmarried mother, Francene, a first-generation Italian American. Bobby endures Catholic grade school nuns who disapprove of his mother, avoids neighborhood gangs and bullies (for the most part) and hangs out with friends with whom he gets into innocent trouble, but he lives within the realities of a working-class existence. Francene’s immigrant parents don’t approve of her unmarried status and idolize her dead brother Johnny who was killed in World War II. Sixth grade Bobby shoplifts a black baseball bat, “a 31-inch Hillerich and Bradsby Louisville Slugger” as his friend procures a baseball from Sears, an iconic East Liberty department store. (Sears offered one-stop shopping – like the Wal-Marts of today; Home Depot sits on the Highland Avenue site.) The bat that Bobby steals speaks to young Bobby’s dreams and how he might obtain them. Francene dreams of becoming a movie star as a way out and the movies are, the essence of what she thinks her lost life is about.” Fame, whether on a movie screen, a concert stage, or on an athletic field, remains a means of escape from the working class. The novel offers an eyewitness account of growing up in the early 1960s in Pittsburgh. Racism, the fight for civil rights, gender inequalities, class disparities, and poverty, are not theoretical concepts in Bathanti’s work.

Today, the Hollow rises up as an urban greenway on either side of Negley Run Boulevard. In East Liberty, the Hollow is a no man’s land, scarred woods filled with abandoned treehouses carved with graffiti, abandoned campfire sites peppered with charred porn magazines, and trash including “Allegheny whitefish” (used condoms), suits of clothes, entire libraries, the roof of a house, a life size statue of Saint Anthony, and a case of desiccated gas masks. Bobby and a  Black man escape a deadly encounter with a street gang in the Hollow by scaling mounds of concrete illegally dumped by contractors over the hillside that lead out of the Hollow. This isn’t an urban playground, but it is the domain of the children of the working class. As I drive under the Meadow Street Bridge today, with its protected bike lane and green infrastructure, I can almost imagine this divide as Bathanti describes it.

Bathanti doesn’t shy away from the tensions and race riots of the civil rights era in East Liberty, or in his novel, The Life of a World to Come (The University of South Carolina Press, 2015). I recall television footage of people running through smoke-filled streets, their faces illuminated in flashes of light from police cars hidden in the haze, and hushed conversations among adults about what was happening in the city neighborhoods. Bathanti was a high school freshman when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I asked about a reference in the novel to a .50 caliber machine gun purchased by the Sons of Italy, a fraternal organization, set up on a roof of a business above a busy intersection. Was this just a rumor?

“It was purported to have happened,” Bathanti said. “We weren’t allowed out, you know, we weren’t going no place. Supposedly, they mount a .50 caliber on the roof like that. Whether or not that’s true, or just, like, classic swagger and hyperbole…”

It didn’t matter; it wasn’t a neighborhood where people owned guns. Most families had members who fought in WWII, and upon their return home found no need for guns. Here,  Bathanti illustrates the fears of the neighborhood, justified or not, of neighbors that once peacefully coexisted. Fathers wait at night on their porches with guns to protect their families.

Class and the stark economic contrasts in the neighborhood of East Liberty and the wealthier neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Highland Park are evident in characters’ livelihoods, home life, and residences. In The Life of the World to Come, George’s father is a steelworker out on strike, the details of which come straight from Bathanti’s experience of his father being out of work for the duration of the 1959 and other strikes. George works at a pharmacy owned by Phil, the father of his girlfriend, which allows Bathanti to explore these dramatic class differences. Phil takes George under his wing and eventually asks George to make bets on his behalf; George sees a way to support his parents during the layoff by manipulating both his own and Phil’s bets made with an East Liberty bookie. In the 1970s, bets on the Steelers through neighborhood bookies were as common as placing bets through apps like FanDuel and BetMGM are today. It goes sideways when Phil can’t cover an excessive bet and leaves George stuck with the fallout, further highlighting the boundaries of class and the relationship between management (Phil) versus labor (George). George has to flee to North Carolina to avoid the consequences of the bet.

Bathanti’s linked short story collections, The High Heart (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007) and The Act of Contrition & Other Stories (Eastover Press, 2023) return to the streets of East Liberty, and although a new working-class family and characters populate these stories, the inequities and fight for fairness found in his novels drive these stories too. Fritz Sweeney, the character Bathanti puts in the driver’s seat of his short stories, comes from a working-class family like Bobby–families where they have all they need, but money is tight. Fritz is a child who relies on himself because his mother, Rita, volatile and unpredictable, explodes in each story where she appears; Fritz believes her to be a hostess at a local club but the reader suspects she may be an exotic dancer in a strip club on Baum Boulevard. Fritz is bewildered by the adults in his life.

Fritz’s age and the possibility of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight figure into the challenges that Fritz and his friend Keith face. Here, as in all of Bathanti’s work, the Catholic Church weighs heavily on his characters, but none more than Keith, who along with his girlfriend, contemplate abortion rather than marriage. Their story offers a look at the lived experience of abortion as the country, and those of the Roman Catholic faith, grappled with the possibility as the seminal case Roe v. Wade worked its way to the Supreme Court.

Bathanti’s story collections take on the bent of magical realism that he sometimes introduces in his novels and in these stories it creates an almost mythical East Liberty. The neighborhood strega (roughly translated to witch or something akin to a witch doctor), wears black and renders powers to conjure and jinx while terrorizing neighborhood children with just a look. Bobby sees Spacaluccio, a monster that lives under the Meadow Street Bridge, in the Hollow. Another time, he ventures in to find and kill the beast with a letter opener, only to discover there is no beast, just Nonno, his grandfather, who’s come to find him and bring him home.

In East Liberty Bathanti writes: “East Liberty is a monster. It eats children.” There’s no need to conjure monsters.

His fiction is a tribute to places that remain: Saint Marie Street, Mount Carmel Cemetery, Peabody High School, Mineo’s Pizza, and the Edgar Thompson Works. It is also an affirmation of places that are gone to memory: Saints Peter and Paul school and church, Rimini’s, Labriola’s, Pompa’s, Rudy’s House of Submarines, Minutello’s restaurant, and Silver Lake Drive-in, now the site of a car wash and storage units on Washington Boulevard. He captures an era of working class culture that no longer exists.

Bathanti’s latest work of fiction, the novella Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days (Regal House Publishing, 2025) returns to the lives of Fritz and Keith in 1973, and takes them out of the confines of East Liberty and into the suburbs of Pittsburgh to work at a toy warehouse in Indianola in repetitive, dead-end jobs. The novella finds the two nineteen-year-olds trying to find meaning in their lives. The western Pennsylvania landscape is familiar territory, as are the complications they face as young men, trying to find their place in a world that has rapidly changed. Bathanti’s characters all look to escape their lives while fighting an equal pull to remain, because their identity is rooted in place. Like in Joyce’s Dublin, place isn’t simply geographical–it is inherent in the working class culture in which characters live. The tension remains across stories because it is, at root, based in economics and class status.

To find Bathanti’s exploration of social justice issues set in my familiar Pittsburgh, written with a touch of magical realism, feels like an epiphany or divination of some kind. There’s a line from the novel Coventry (Novello Festival Press, 2006) that I have written on a Post-It note on my desk: “He sunk to his knees and took up his father.” In the context of the novel, it is of a son joining his father’s path and accepting his legacy, but as a stand-alone line, it speaks to carrying traditions, culture, love, and ethics forward and creating a legacy in the written word.

Donna Wojnar Dzurilla earned her MFA from Carlow University (Pittsburgh PA) in 2023, where she studied at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen, Voices from the Attic series, The Last Word and Other Stories: A Shelia-Na-Gig Anthology, Northern Appalachia Review and other publications. Her poetry has appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Kaleidoscope, and in the anthologies The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: Pittsburgh Poems, Tributaria: Poetry, Prose, & Art Inspired by Tributaries of the Ohio River Watershed, and North Coast Voices: An Anthology of Poetry and Images of the Great Lakes Region 2025 and other publications. Book reviews appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Appalachian Studies. Creative nonfiction has appeared in The Watershed Journal, Dionne’s Story Volume I & II: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose for the Awareness of Violence Against Women, and in the “Raves” and “A Life Well Lived” columns of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dzurilla’s manuscript/novel, Work Greens, traces a young woman’s journey during the 1970s from single motherhood to employment as a steelworker at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works. Her manuscript collection of short stories, Switchback and Other Stories explores themes of class, union and labor issues, feminism, family, and identity set in and around Pittsburgh. Dzurilla’s writing has been supported by the Appalachian Writers Workshop (2020 scholarship), The Sundress Academy for the Arts (2025 writers residency at Firefly Farms), and a 2025 Support for Artists Grant awarded by the City of Pittsburgh funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). Dzurilla was the founding member of the Pennsylvania Chapter of Writers for Democratic Action (https://www.writersfordemocraticaction.org/) and she volunteers as a legal observer for Frontline Dignity (https://frontlinedignity.org/ ).