Joe Fiorito was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As a young man in Northern Ontario, he worked in a paper mill, surveyed roads, and laboured in bush camps prior to becoming involved in community development and arts consulting. Fiorito spent five years working with a staff of Inuit journalists at CBC Radio in Iqaluit, NWT before transferring to Regina, where he wrote, produced and directed CBC Radio's highly acclaimed "The Food Show," a weekly program about food and agriculture. Fiorito lived for many years in Montreal, where he first wrote a weekly food column for HOUR, and later signed on as a city columnist for the Montreal Gazette. His first collection, Comfort Me With Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table, a series of essays about food and memory drawn from Fiorito's HOUR columns, was published by Nuage Editions (now Signature Editions) in 1994. In 2000, it was reissued by McLelland & Stewart. Tango on the Main, Fiorito's second collection with Signature, was selected from his Gazette columns. Fiorito relocated to Toronto, writing first for the National Post and then for the Toronto Star. In 1999, he published his family memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying, which became a national best-seller and received widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the award-winning novel The Song Beneath the Ice and Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto.