Professor John Guzlowski will be the guest speaker at our upcoming PAAA meeting this Sunday, October 20 at 2:00 PM at the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library located at 3310 Connecticut Ave NW in Washington, DC. Please RSVP below.
Author and poet John Guzlowski will be speaking about his newly published work, Who I Am: Lives Told in Kitchen Polish as well as his earlier collection of poetry Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded which won the 2017 Ben Franklin Award for Poetry.
The Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library is best accessible via metro. Street parking is free on Sundays. Paid parking available at Sam's Park & Shop ($25). Please budget enough time to find parking as we are planning to start punctually.
“Stark uncompromising humanity. What I find fascinating is Guzlowski’s ability to always say something new…balancing overarching social commentary with the smallest, heart-wrenching details.” – Michael Meyerhofer, poetry editor of the Atticus Review
Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction. Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.
In reviewing Guzlowski’s book Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Exceptional…even astonished me…reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.”
Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.
