SDSU English Professor Emeritus Fred Moramarco Dies; Father of Helix Grad

Frederico “Fred” Moramarco, a longtime English professor at San Diego State and father of Helix grad and filmmaker Steve Moramarco, died this month at  age 73, his son says.

“It is with a heavy heart this Valentine’s Day that I announce the passing of my father Federico just before midnight last night,” Steve wrote on his father’s website.

“It happened as it sometimes does, without warning—he suffered cardiac arrest in a parking lot and never recovered. Ironically, he had just finished being a pretend patient for medical students at UCSD. 
A memorial is being planned for Sunday, March 18, in San Diego.”

According to a posting on the website of Poetry International, where Fred Moramarco was the founding editor, he was the author and editor of seven books, including The Poetry of Men’s Lives, Men of Our Time, Italian Pride: 101 Reasons to Be Proud You’re Italian.

“His most recent book of poetry is The City of Eden where many of his selected poems have been gathered together. Links to Fred’s published poems and essays as well as his introduction to the inaugural issue of Poetry International can be seen below.

“His poem, Elegy for Kenneth Koch, was his last poem published in Poetry International.”

Steve Moramarco was featured in a story three months ago about his return to Helix to screen his mockumentary The Great Intervention.

Steve provided this obituary by Fred’s friend Al Zolynas:

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The San Diego area lost one of its literary and theatrical Renaissance men when Fred Moramarco died suddenly of a heart attack late on the eve of Valentine’s Day. He leaves behind his beloved wife, Clarissa, two sons, Stephen and Nicholas, and two grandchildren, and a multitude of friends drawn from the many circles he belonged to.  

Fred Moramarco was an enthusiastic and boundlessly energetic participant in family life, literary scholarship, theater, poetry, gourmet cooking, politics, the men’s movement, and other forms of transformational work.  He is dearly missed by all who were touched by his generous spirit and wide embrace.

Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Fred Moramarco was the son of Stephen and Nina Moramarco, immigrants from a small village in southern Italy. He was the youngest of four children, the others all sisters, though an earlier son, “the first Fred,” died tragically, hit by an automobile.  

Moramarco completed his undergraduate work at Long Island University, receiving a B.A. in English in 1964. In that same year he moved West and worked briefly as a radio disk jockey in Ogden, Utah, before enrolling in graduate school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he quickly established himself as the English Department’s star student. 

He was rewarded with fellowships, grants and the editorship of the Western Humanities Review. While in graduate school, he and his first wife Sheila Sobell had their two boys.  After completing work on his M.A. (1966) and his Ph.D in American Literature (1969)—his dissertation was published as the definitive scholarly work on the neglected American novelist, Edward Dahlberg—Moramarco accepted a full-time position as a young assistant professor in the English Department of the then San Diego State College in 1969.

For the next 35 years, Dr. Moramarco lived the life of a productive and accomplished scholar of American Literature, publishing numerous articles in highly regarded academic journals; receiving prestigious grants and fellowships, such as a National Endowment in the Humanities and a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy; co-authoring and co-editing a variety of scholarly books, including Modern American Poetry: 1865-1950, (with William Sullivan and Alan Shucard) and Containing Multitudes: Poetry in the United States since 1950 (with William Sullivan), Men of Our Time: An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America, and The Poetry of Men’s Lives: An International Anthology (both with Al Zolynas).

With his son Stephen, a Los Angeles actor, musician, and filmmaker, Moramarco wrote two popular books: Italian Pride: 101 Reasons to Be Proud You’re Italian, and the cookbook, Deliciously Italian, containing recipes personally and painstakingly gathered from Apulia, Italy, his family’s ancestral region.

Moramarco was an able administrator, at various times directing the School of Literature and the Graduate Studies Program in English and Comparative Literature. Throughout his academic career he also wrote and published book reviews, essays, and feature articles for various publications, including the San Diego Reader, and his own poetry, which he enjoyed presenting at numerous readings throughout the community. 

He also took time to pursue his passion for the theater as an actor, director, and producer.  He acted in productions at the Old Globe, The San Diego Rep, The Theatre Inc, Sledgehammer, Diversionary Theatre and other San Diego companies.  

After his retirement from academia, Fred Moramarco was artistic director of Laterthanever Productions and co-produced the Patté Award-winning Hannah and Martin at the Lyceum Theater in 2006. 

He also produced and directed the West Coast premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Mrs. Farnsworth in 2004, and adapted and directed three of Raymond Carver’s short stories  (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) for Laterthanever Productions in 2009.

At San Diego State University, in 1995, Moramarco became the founding editor of Poetry International; he continued as editor in chief until his retirement. In 2010 a selected collection of his poetry was published, The City of Eden, whose title beautifully captures Moramarco’s commitment to both the civitas of urban life and the aspiration to redemption and hard-won innocence in the postmodern world. 

Of The City of Eden, the contemporary poet Gerald Locklin writes, “Fred Moramarco has been among the few great men of letters of my literary lifetime…. [The City of Eden] will take its place among the literary and human milestones of our time.”

In recent years, Fred and Clarissa enjoyed traveling overseas, visiting their two grandkids in Spain, hosting parties, fundraising for the theater, hiking with friends, enjoying city life in San Diego, and sharing their lives with friends and their dog, Bella, who Fred wryly once said recently had been a beneficiary of the obedience school’s policy of “no dog left behind.”