By Alexander Rivero, Staff Writer

A little over twenty years ago, after the passing of his wife, Frank Plateroti closed down the international production company he had been operating. In regular contact with the Communications department over at William Paterson University, he was offered a chance to teach communications courses, and he agreed. 

What started off as a possible gig turned into a second career, and for twenty years he taught at William Paterson. He loved the production courses, saw some enormous potential, and fell in love with one course in particular—Communication and Action. 

“I absolutely loved that course,” he says, “and after a while I incorporated some self-esteem components into it. I wanted the students to have more than just a course of papers, assignments, and lectures. I wanted more for these kids, specifically to really get ready for what awaited them after college.” 

Plateroti’s students, whom he referred to in class as pre-career professionals, liked the material enough to encourage him to put it all into a book. It was advice Plateroti took to heart, writing his first book, Speak No Evil: In Search of Our Self-Esteem, Self-Empowerment, and Self-Worth, published in October of this year. 

Plateroti is a focused man, loyal to his vision and tireless in his approach and execution. His energy transfers over in conversation, and there is an electricity to his voice that speaks to the urgency of his mission and his belief in his purpose. At 60, having already earned a masters in communications and media productions, he decided to return to school for a doctorate in education research with a concentration in psychology. He finished in four years, a process that he describes as the most difficult one he has ever personally undertaken in his life, and has since kept up the pace, publishing two books. The first, mentioned above, is Speak No Evil, and the other is the first installment of a planned trilogy about the history of his Sicilian family’s arrival in the United States. Book One of the tree-part set is called East Clifton Avenue: From Sicily to America, 1889-1966, and it is also available for purchase. 

“My grandmother lived with us for years,” he says, “and I head a lot of stories from her. Lots of connected and

unconnected stories. So I connected them at freedom here, in this book, which is really just a tapestry of stories, with some implementations of the lessons I’ve been teaching for years.”

At heart, however, Plateroti is a born teacher, and his new writing career is but an extension of his old job, albeit quieter, more solitary, and done from home. He cites his access to his students, and specifically his ability to inspire them on a daily basis, as the crowning joys of his professional career. It was a particular pleasure to have had such an influence in this age of hyper-communications and social media which, he assures us, has fundamentally altered everything for everyone, but especially for the young.

“I look at social media,” he says, “and I see the building of jealousy, envy resentment. The whole idea of ‘look at what I’m doing’, which is of course always a sneaky way of showing the people looking at the photographs what they’re not doing. There is something profoundly wrong with it all, with the idea of people surrendering who they are to others, of being told by others what they should be doing, wanting, pursuing.” 

Students would often come up to him, he remembers, and tell him about how they were cancelling their memberships to these social media platforms. Understanding this reaffirmed for Plateroti a lesson he felt should serve as the backbone—one of them at least—of Speak No Evil: that the most important things we have in our lives is relationships. 

“No doubt about it, the happiest people I’ve ever met in my life are those people invested into the lives of others,” he says. “And by extension, the saddest ones are those too invested in themselves. That said, we also have to have a sound relationship with ourselves, a healthy self-esteem, and developing the basis from which to never allow others to have power over us and determine our self-worth.” 

For more information on Frank Plateroti, EdD., please visit his website at www.drfjesteem.com. There, readers can find a summary of his life’s work, reviews of his books, and links to websites where they can purchase each of those books. For those searching specifically for copies of Speak No Evil and/or East Clifton Avenue, simply go to to amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, or wherever books are sold.