The Galicia Jewish Museum invites to a meeting with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski devoted to the book “Karl Heinz M.”. The meeting will be chaired by Professor Karen Underhill from the University of Illinois in Chicago. The event will be online and will take place on Friday, July 2nd at 18.00.
Registration: www.zoom.us
The event accompanies the 30th edition of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and is part of the “Galicia. Here You Read” project.
The book “Karl-Heinz M,” published by the Biuro Literackie, continues the strategy of keeping a poetic notebook on boundaries and extreme situations in the spirit of “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters. “Kwiatkowski does not write about the Holocaust, but about the world in the Holocaust, in its shadow – in a world whose Holocaust is an inalienable and irreducible point of reference,” said literary critic Leszek Szaruga about the work.
Karen Underhill is Assistant Professor of Polish literature and Polish-Jewish studies in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-founder of the Polish Jewish Studies Initiative. Her research, in which Polish and Jewish cultures meet, focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernism, Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish culture in the interwar period, and changing narratives of Poland as a multicultural and pluralist space of encounter. She received her PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. She was the 2012-13 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She is a co-founder of Massolit Books & Cafe in Krakow. Her articles have appeared in POLIN, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic & East European Journal, Ruch Literacki, Teksty Drugie, and Czas Kultury. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Writing in the Third Language: Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity.”
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet, musician, and author of several books of poetry revolving around the subjects of history, remembrance, and ethics. He is a member of the psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa. He has been a beneficiary of numerous international literary programs, such as “Artist in Residence” in Vienna and “Styria Artist in Residence” in Graz. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski co-hosts the workshop “Virus of Hate” at the University of Oxford.
He was also a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, Jewish Theological Seminary, the University of Cambridge, the Ted Hughes Society (“Crow at 50”), The University of Texas at Dallas, and Miroslaw Balka’s Studio of Spatial Activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He is a member of the European literature platform Versopolis. He was a guest at a number of festivals, such as Oslo Internasjonale Poesifestival and Lahti International Writers Reunion. His music and literary works have been published and reviewed in The Guardian, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Poetry In Translation, CBC, Pitchfork, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Billboard, Spin, Chicago Tribune, Times, NPR, BBC, and KEXP. As a musician, he performed with his band at events, such as Desert Daze Festival, Rockaway Beach Festival, SXSW, Primavera Sound, and Iceland Airwaves. Trupa Trupa’s songs are regularly broadcasted on radio programmes hosted by Iggy Pop and Henry Rollins. The band was also invited to take part in a legendary NPR Tiny Desk session. Its music has been published by global record labels such as Sub Pop, Glitterbeat Records, Ici d’ailleurs, and Lovitt Records.
