Don Bialostosky is a Professor in the Composition: Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric group who is also active in the literature program in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English. He received his PhD in English in 1977 from the University of Chicago.
Don is the author of a long list of chapters and articles on the Romantics, with particular attention to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on pedagogy, rhetoric, poetry, and dialogics.
He is the author of four books, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (U of Chicago P, 1984) and Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (Cambridge UP 1992), Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality (Parlor P 2016), and How to Play a Poem (U of Pittsburgh P 2017). He is co-editor of the collection, Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature (Indiana UP, 1995). He has been a leading figure in thinking through the uses and consequences of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially with reference to pedagogy, composition, rhetoric, and poetry.
His most recent book, How to Play a Poem, provides a fresh approach to reading and teaching poetry inspired by his work with the Bakhtin School and his teaching poetry for many years. Aimed a a wide audience of readers, teachers, and students, it shows how knowledge of everyday verbal exchanges is fundamental to reading and teaching poetry and how the formal features of poems serve as “signs of life” for the reanimation of tone.
Professional Service
Don served on the MLA Delegate Assembly, the Board of Directors of the Society for Critical Exchange, the Executive Committees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and of the Association of Departments of English; he served as President of ADE in 2001. He was head of Penn State’s English department from 1996 through 2001 and currently serves as chair of the English Department at Pitt, where he chaired the Year of the Humanities in the University in 2015-16. He has also taught at the University of Utah, the University of Washington, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Toledo, where he was a Distinguished University Professor of English.
Teaching
Don has taught undergraduates in Seminar in Composition, Introduction to Critical Reading, History of Criticism, and senior seminars on Wordsworth. In addition to teaching Pitt’s required graduate courses History of Criticism and Seminar in Pedagogy, he has taught seminars entitled, Poetry as Utterance: Theory and Pedagogy, Research in Bakhtin School Rhetoric and Poetics, History of Rhetoric: Tropes and Figures, History of Rhetoric: Romantic Writers and Classical Rhetoric, and Rhetorical Criticism of Literature.
