John Guzlowski | |
|---|---|
 self-portrait photograph | |
| Born | 1948 (age 74–75) |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Period | 1970s- |
| Website | |
| lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com | |
John Guzlowski (born 1948) is a Polish-American author.
John Guzlowski | |
|---|---|
| self-portrait photograph | |
| Born | 1948 (age 74–75) |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1970s- |
| Website | |
| lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com | |
John Guzlowski (born 1948) is a Polish-American author.
John Guzlowski was born the son of parents who met in a Nazi slave labor camp in Germany.
His mother Tekla Hanczarek came from a small community west of Lwów in what was then Poland (modern Lviv, Ukraine) where her father was a forest warden. John's father, Jan, was born in a farming community north of Poznań. John was born Zbigniew Guzlowski in a Displaced Persons camp in Vienenburg, Germany in 1948, and changed his name to John when he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1968.
His parents, his sister Donna, and he came to the US as DPs in 1951. After working on farms in western New York State to pay off their passage to America, they eventually settled in Chicago in the city's old Polish Downtown in the vicinity of St. Fidelis Parish in Humboldt Park.
After attending the University of Illinois in Chicago, he completed a Ph.D. in American literature at Purdue University. He taught literature and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and retired in 2005.
He lives in Lynchburg, VA, with his wife Linda Calendrillo and his daughter Lillian Guzlowski and granddaughter Lucy Guzlowski.
Growing up in Chicago's immigrant and displaced person neighborhoods, Guzlowski regularly interacted “with Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish Cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Soviets.” Guzlowski would later write that his written work was composed to "try to remember them and their voices."
Guzlowski earned his Ph.D. in English at Purdue University in 1980, and is now retired from Eastern Illinois University, where he taught contemporary American literature and poetry writing. His poems deal with his parents' experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. He has authored three books about his parents' experiences: Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica),Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press). These books continue the story of his parents that began in his chapbook Language of Mules which was republished as Język Mułów i Inne Wiersze, a Polish-English edition of this chapbook and other poems, and published by Biblioteka Śląska in Katowice, Poland. His poem "What My Father Believed" was read by Garrison Keillor on the Writers Almanac program. Other poems have appeared in a number of periodicals in the US, Poland, Italy, India, and Hungary, including North American Review, Rattle, Atticus Review, Salon, Margie, Nimrod, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Slask, and Ackent.
Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, in a review of the bilingual edition of Language of Mules, wrote that Guzlowki's work "astonished" him and revealed an "enormous ability for grasping reality."
Professor Thomas Napierkowski has written that "John Guzlowski is arguably the most accomplished Polish-American poet on the contemporary scene, a writer who will figure prominently in any history of Polish-American literature; and 'Lightning and Ashes' firmly establishes Guzlowski's artistic standing not just in Polonia but in the world of American letters."
His essays on contemporary American and Polish authors can be found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies , Shofar , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , Polish American Studies , Journal of Evolutionary Psychology , Studies in Jewish American Literature , and The Polish Review .
John Guzlowski received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry from the Independent Book Publishers Association and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award for Thought Provoking writing for his memoir in prose and poetry Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded. He also received an Illinois Arts Council Award in 2001. In 2012, he received the Polish American Historical Association Creative Arts Award for his writing and contribution to Polish American Letters.
He is also the author of three mystery novels set in a Polish-American neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s: Suitcase Charlie and Little Altar Boys and Murdertown (all from Kasva Press). He has also written Retreat: A Love Story, a novel about two German Lovers separated during World War II.
He recently published three books of poems, True Confessions and Mad Monk Ikkyu and Small Talk . The first book is a collection of memoir poems that trace his life from the 60s to the present. It is published by Darkhouse Books. The second book follows the adventures of a real zen Buddhist monk as he journeys from the sea to a temple in the mountains of Japan. Finishing Line Press publishes it. His most recent book is the award-winning Small Talk: Poems about God and Writing and Me, published by Snake Nation Press. A collection of his poems, translated into Hindi (Hindi title: यातना शिविर में साथिनें) by Devesh Path Sariya, was published in India in 2023.
Since 2018, Guzlowski has been a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish daily newspaper in America.
Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Julian Tuwim, known also under the pseudonym "Oldlen" as a lyricist, was a Polish poet, born in Łódź, then part of the Russian Partition. He was educated in Łódź and in Warsaw where he studied law and philosophy at Warsaw University. After Poland's return to independence in 1918, Tuwim co-founded the Skamander group of experimental poets with Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. He was a major figure in Polish literature, admired also for his contribution to children's literature. He was a recipient of the prestigious Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1935.
Ikkyū was an eccentric, iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet. He had a great impact on the infusion of Japanese art and literature with Zen attitudes and ideals, as well as on Zen itself, including breaking Buddhist monastic teachings with his stance against celibacy.
John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an 'international regionalism' in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.
Zbigniew Herbert was a Polish poet, essayist, drama writer and moralist. He is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers. While he was first published in the 1950s, soon after he voluntarily ceased submitting most of his works to official Polish government publications. He resumed publication in the 1980s, initially in the underground press. Since the 1960s, he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books have been translated into 38 languages.
Andrzej Bursa was a Polish poet and writer.
Jan Jakub Twardowski was a Polish poet and Catholic priest. He was a chief Polish representative of contemporary religious lyrics. He wrote short, simple poems, humorous, which often included colloquialisms. He joined observations of nature with philosophical reflections.
Stanisław Barańczak was a Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He is perhaps most well known for his English-to-Polish translations of the dramas of William Shakespeare and of the poetry of E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Keats, Robert Frost, Edward Lear and others.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Miłosz Biedrzycki (MLB ) is a Polish poet, translator and geophysical engineer. One of the authors of the "brulion generation".
Paul Carroll was an American poet and the founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago. A professor for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago and professor emeritus, his books include Poem in Its Skin and Odes. While a student, he was an editor of Chicago Review. In 1985 he won the Chicago Poet's Award, and the city published his book "The Garden of Earthly Delights". His papers, The Paul Carroll Papers, are archived in the Special Collection Research Center at the University of Chicago Library. Among those papers are documents between Carroll's buddy, fellow poet and critic James Dickey, where Mr. Dickey states that Paul's late poetry was his best. One of these late poems, "Song After Making Love" was published in 2008 by Cold Mountain Review at Appalachian State University.
Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki is a Polish poet.
Leszek Engelking was a Polish poet, short story writer, novelist, translator, literary critic, essayist, Polish philologist, and literary academic, scholar, and lecturer.
Jerzy Pietrkiewicz or Peterkiewicz was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and literary critic who spent much of his life in British exile.
Jarosław Mikołajewski is a Polish poet, writer and translator of the Italian language. He is also the author of children's books, essayist and journalist.
Wacław Waldemar Michalski is a Polish poet, librarian, editor, curator and critic.
Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna was a Polish poet, prose writer, playwright and translator. She was one of the most acclaimed and celebrated poets during Poland's interwar period.
Karol Maliszewski is a Polish poet, prose writer, literary critic, and literary scholar. He is habilitated doctor - professor at the University of Wrocław.
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