After Miłosz: Polish Poetry

In the 20th and the 21th Century

Chicago, Chopin Theatre, 9/30 –10/3 2011

THE FESTIVAL

The Chicago's literary festival titled After Milosz: Polish Poetry in the 20th and 21th Century is the largest presentation of Polish poetry in the United States this year. The festival celebrates the year of Czeslaw Milosz and commemorates the centennial anniversary of the birth of the Nobel Prize winner. The event goes beyond a familiar formula of commenting the work of the poet and offers a broader view on the contemporary Polish poetry. Besides the academic conference dedicated to Milosz's work, and a panel with the greatest America poets (Jorie Graham, Charles Simic) remembering the artist and discussing his influence on American poetry, the program includes readings of the most talented modern Polish poets of three generations. From the best known (Zagajewski, Sommer) to the most often awarded young writer nowadays, Justyna Bargielska. An important part of the festival will be two concerts: the opening show will present the best Polish rappers FISZ and EMADE whose songs are inspired by Polish poetry; another concert will present one of the best jazz singers in the world, Patricia Barber, who will perform especially for this occasion.

The main organizers of the festival are the Fundation of Tygodnik Powszechny magazine and the Joseph Conrad International Literary Festival in Krakow, for which the Chicago festival is a portion of the larger international project for promoting Polish literature abroad. The co-organizer of the festival is the Head of the Slavic Department at University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor Michal Pawel Markowski, who represents also the Polish Interdisciplinary Program at UIC supported by The Hejna Fund, and also serves as the artistic director to the Conrad Festival.

The festival After Milosz will take place in the Chopin Theater, one of the most independent and vivid cultural centers in Chicago. The festival is financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Complete information about the festival can be found on our website at www.aftermilosz.com.

PROGRAM

Friday, September 30, 2011

5.30 PM: Opening reception

9 PM: FISZ/EMADE: LIVE CONCERT. Best Polish rappers perform music inspired by Polish poetry

FISZ/ EMADE

Fisz (Bartosz Waglewski) is an award winning Polish rap artist. He is the son of musician Wojciech Waglewski and older brother of Emade (Piotr Waglewski). Studied in Europejska Akademia Sztuk (EAS).Musical style of Fisz is unconventional. At the very beginning of his career he started out as a Hip-hop artist, but went experimental soon after releasing Tworzywo Sztuczne - Wielki Ciężki Słoń in 2004. Fisz and his producer Emade seek inspiration in black music giving soul, funk and jazz touch to their projects. His lyrics are often based on wordplay.Internationally he gave concerts on stages of London, Berlin, Bordeaux, Calvi, Dijon, Marseille, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Paris and Saint Vellier.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

9 AM: Complimentary breakfast 10 AM: MIŁOSZ IN/ON AMERICA: A COLLOQUIUM Panel 1: 10:15-11:15 AM Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern), Milosz and Biography as 'Literary Fact' Oren Izenberg (UIC), Just One Person. Panel 2: 11:30-12:45 AM Mira Rosenthal (Stanford), The Making of the American Czesław Miłosz.

Bożena Shallcross (University of Chicago), Signature Pieces.

Lunch Break: 1-2 PM Panel 3: 2-3:15 PM Benjamin Paloff (University of Michigan), Czeslaw Milosz: Faith without Consolation Stephen Burt (Harvard University), The Paradox of Wisdom Literature. Panel 4: 3:30-4:45 PM Christina Pugh (UIC), Czeslaw Milosz and the Affinity for the Image. Michal Pawel Markowski (UIC), What is Objective Poetry

Speakers:

Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale UP, 2010), received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism. Recent volumes of translations include: Wislawa Szymborska, Here (Harcourt, 2010, with Stanislaw Baranczak), which received the 2010 Found in Translation Awards, and Adam Zagajewski, Unseen Hand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011). She is an associate editor of the revised Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), and is currently working

on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz for Farrar Straus and Giroux. Her essays and translations have appeared in TLS, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, and other publications.

Oren Izenberg is the English Department Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first book,Being Numerous: The Poetic Imagination of the Ground of Social Life, (Princeton, 2011) describes the ways in which 20th century poets responded to a century of crisis and rethought, by means of their art, the question of what counts as a person. A new project, Lyric Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind, proposes that the object the mind makes—principally, the lyric poem— might be better understood by giving some attention to our strongest

recent accounts of the nature and structure of thought. It places poems alongside recent work in (analytic) philosophy, considering works of art variously as examples, dramatizations of, and experiments in the mind’s workings.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of the poetry collection The Local World and the translator of several books by Polish poet Tomasz Rożycki. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Commission. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Houston and will soon complete a PhD. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Bożena Shallcross is Associate Professor of Polish Literature at the University of Chicago and the College. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Academic Advisor for the Interdisciplinary Program at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; she also serves as a member of the Board of Directors at the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of Reading Cultures Core Sequence, as well as a faculty member in the Committee on Creative Writing and Program on Poetry and Poetics. Over the years her research interests have evolved from the interart studies to the culturalist approach to the Holocaust. This trajectory is

exemplified in her book publications, including The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish Jewish Culture (Indiana UP 2011); Rzeczy i Zagłada (self-translated into Polish, Universitas 2010); Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (Northwestern

UP 2002; 2008 2nd edition); and Cień i forma. O wyobraźni plastycznej Leopolda Staffa (Glob 1987). She also edited The Effect of Palimpsest: Culture, Literature, History (Peter Lang 2011; co-edited with Ryszard Nycz); Polish Encounters /Russian Identity (Indiana University Press, 2005; co-edited with David L. Ransel), Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self (Ohio UP 2002), The Other Herbert (Indiana Slavic Studies 1998), Dom romantycznego artysty (Wydawnictwo Literackie 1989).

Benjamin Paloff grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard and at the University of Michigan, where he is currently assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature. He is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems, and has translated several books from Polish, most recently Lodgings: Selected Poems of Andrzej Sosnowski. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, he is a poetry editor at Boston Review.

Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (2010); Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009); and Parallel Play (poems; 2006). His writings appear regularly in Boston Review, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and other venues in the US and UK.

Christina Pugh is the author of two books of poems: Restoration (Northwestern University Press /TriQuarterly Books, 2008) and Rotary (Word Press, 2004), which received the Word Press First Book Prize. She has also published a chapbook, Gardening at Dusk (Wells College Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and other periodicals, as well as in anthologies such as Poetry 180. Her honors have included the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the

Grolier Poetry Prize, the Illinois Arts Council’s individual artist fellowship in poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship for the Humanities, and residencies at the Ragdale and Ucross colonies. Pugh’s criticism has recently appeared in Poetry, Verse, Ploughshares, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. She is an associate professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English department.

Michal Pawel Markowski is the Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Literary Festival in Kraków, Poland, and a Member of the Academic Council of the ‘Interzones’, the first Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme, selected and funded by the EU for its innovative and challenging approach to the Humanities. The author and editor of over twenty books on philosophy and literature, translated into several languages, including Black Waters: Gombrowicz,

World, Literature (2004) and Polish Modern Literature: Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy (2006). He also edited or translated works by Schlegel, Proust, Barthes, and Deleuze and received several important literary and academic prizes in Poland, including Kościelscy Prize (1998), and Kazimierz Wyka Prize (2011). He is now working on a collection of his travel writings and the book titled Dual Transmission: Subjectivity and Textuality in the Western Tradition.

5 PM

PERHAPS ONLY MY REVERENCE WILL SAVE ME: A POLITICAL TRIBUTE TO MIŁOSZ.

Jorie Graham; Charles Simic; Adam Zagajewski.

Moderator: Stephen Burt.

PANELISTS:

Jorie Graham. Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet “One of the most intelligent poets in the language . . . [Graham] is like no one else, neither in her rhythms nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space.” —Times Literary Supplement “Graham stands among a small group of poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore), whose styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they exist as self-made things.” —The Nation

Born in New York City, Graham was reared and educated in Italy and France. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied philosophy, until she was expelled for participating in student riots. Returning to New York, she studied filmmaking at New York University. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Charles Simic. US Poet Laureate (2007-2008) Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet “Charles Simic's writing comes dancing out on the balls of its feet, colloquially fit as a fiddle.” —Seamus Heaney “There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures...Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.” —Harvard Review

Charles Simic, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2007-2008), was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953 at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire where until his retirement he was a professor of English at the university. A poet, essayist and translator, he has been honored with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Since 1967 Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, Master of Disguises(2010);That Little Something (2008);My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), which won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate.

Adam Zagajewski. Acclaimed Polish Poet “Seldom has the muse...spoken to anyone with such clarity and urgency as in Zagajewski's case.” —Joseph Brodsky “Zagajewski is now one of the most familiar and highly regarded names in poetry both in Europe and in this country.” —New York Review of Books

Polish poet, fiction writer, and essayist, has lived in France since 1982. He was born in richly multicultural Lwów (today in Ukraine) in 1945 and spent his youth first in Silesia and then in

Cracow, where he graduated from the Jagiellonian University. He published his first volume of poetry in 1972 and a collection of essays (with Julian Kornhauser) in 1974 which amounted to a literary manifesto. He has been considered a representative of the `Generation of ‘68’ or New Wave (Nowa Fala): he was an active dissident during the seventies, and some of his poems and essays deal with political issues. On emigration from Poland in 1982, he settled in Paris; since 1988 he has served as Visiting Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he teaches graduate classes in poetry and literature every spring semester. He won a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1979), the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Stockholm), a Prix de la Liberté (Paris), and a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry (1992). He is currently co-editor of Zeszyty literackie (Literary Review), published in Paris. His poems and essays have been translated into many European languages and widely published, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the Partisan Review. Two translations of his work published in 1997, an anthology of essays and a collection of his poetry, were recently reviewed in March 23rd (1998) issue of The New Republic

8 PM PATRICIA BARBER: LIVE CONCERT

Patricia Barber was born in a west Chicago suburb to a big-band saxophonist father who played on call with Glenn Miller and a sometime blues singer mother, Barber studied classical piano and psychology at the University of Iowa. Patricia Barber is an internationally renowned jazz vocalist, pianist, and composer. She has released nine CDs as a leader for Premonition Records and Blue Note Records, and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Composition. Ms. Barber regularly sells out concerts in European capitals; Paris is her musical second home. She has performed in major performance centers such as Carnegie Hall, Herbst Hall in San Francisco, the Opéra Comique and Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Cemal Resit Concert Hall in Istanbul, and major performing arts centers in such far-flung capitals as Seoul and Moscow. She has received rave receptions at major jazz festivals the world over, including the North Sea Jazz Festival, Umbria Jazz, and others in Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, Monterrey, Nice, New York, Dublin, Paris, Korea, and Vancouver.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

10 AM

CHOPIN POETRY BRUNCH

12 PM POLISH POETS READ THEIR POETRY Justyna Bargielska; Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar; Tomasz Różycki; Piotr Sommer; Adam Zagajewski. Moderator: Grzegorz Jankowicz

Justyna Bargielska. Poet, a social activist, and a writer. Bargielska is the winner of the 2010 and the 2011 Gdynia Literary Prize. The author of three books of poetry: Dating Sessions (2003), China Shipping (2005) and Dwa Fiaty (2010). In 2010 her book of short stories, Obsoletki, was published by Wydawnictwo Czarne and nominated to The Nike Prize. She lives in Warsaw (Poland).

Bogumila Kielar lives in Warsaw, where she lectures in philosophy, and works as an editor and film critic. She has published two collections of poetry: Sacra conversazione (1992), which received two awards for the best 1993 poetry début as well as the Koscielski Foundation Prize (Geneva, 1993); and Materia prima (1999), which was shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Prize, the most prestigious of Polish awards, in 2000. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Tomasz Różycki, born in 1970, is a poet and translator. He lives in Opole. His published volumes of poetry are: Vaterland (1997), Anima (1999), Chata umaita (Country Cottage, 2001), Świat i Antyświat (World and Antiworld, 2003), Kolonie (Colonies, 2006), and the epic poem Dwanaście stacji (Twelve Stations, 2004).His work has appeared in many periodicals and anthologies in Poland and abroad. He has won literary prizes including the K. K. Baczyński Award (1997), the Czas Kultury Prize (1997) and the Rainer Maria Rilke Award (1998). Różycki has been nominated for the Paszport Polityki (2004) and for Poland's top literary prize, the Nike Award (2005 and 2007). He won the Kościelski Foundation Prize (2004), and the literary journal Zeszyty Literackie's Joseph Brodsky Award (2006).

Piotr Sommer is poet, translator, anthology editor and essayist. He regularly gives lectures at American universities and has gained various awards. As well as eight collections of poetry in his own language, from W krześle (1977) to Piosenka pasterska (1999), he has had two collections published in translation: Things to Translate and Other Poems (1991) and Ein freier Tag in April (2002).Sommer translates from British, Irish and American literature, including works by Allen Ginsberg and Seamus Heaney, and is the main editor of Literatura na Świecie (World Literature), a journal for literature in (Polish) translation.

4.00 PM FOUND IN TRANSLATION PRIZE awarding ceremony

The FOUND IN TRANSLATION Award is to be given annually to the translator or translators of the best translation of a work of Polish literature into English that was published as a book in the preceding calendar year. The Award consists of a three-month residency in Krakow, with lodging, a stipend in the amount of 2,000 PLN monthly, an airline ticket to and from Krakow funded by the Polish Book Institute, and a financial award of 10,000 PLN funded by the W.A.B. Publishing House. The Award is given by a Selection Committee consisting of representatives of the Polish Book Institute, Polish Cultural Institute in London, and Polish Cultural Institute in New York. The Director of the Polish Book Institute is to be President of the Selection Committee. The name of the laureate is to be announced during the award ceremony, which will be organized each year in the laureate’s country of origin. Candidates for the Award can be nominated by private persons as well institutions in Poland and abroad. Nominations are to be sent to the Polish Book Institute, 31-011 Kraków ul. Szczepańska 1, Poland, e-mail biuro@instytutksiazki.pl with the subject-heading FOUND IN TRANSLATION. The nomination is to include the book title, name of the author, name of the translator, publisher, and a statement of the reasons for the nomination. The deadline for sending nominations is January 31 of each year, by midnight.

Reception to follow

Monday, October 3, 2011

5 PM LIBERATURE: POETRY OF THE BOOK A lecture by Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer (Kraków, Poland) John M Flaxman Library Special Collections, (The School of The Art Institute of Chicago)

Zenon Fajfer is a poet, a writer and theorist of liberature, and a playwright. He is a co-founder of the Liberature Reading Room in Kraków and the editor of the Liberature series published by Ha!art. Along with Katarzyna Bazarnik, Fajfer has co-authored the liberary books Oka-leczenie (2000–2009) and (O)Patrzenie (2003). He has also written the book/bottle But Eyeing Like Ozone Whole (2004), the multimedia poetry book dwadzieścia jeden liter / ten letters (2010), and a collection of essays on the theory and program of liberature, titled Liberatura czyli literatura totalna. Teksty zebrane z lat 1999–2000( Liberature Or Total Literature. Collected Essays 1999–2009 (2010), translated and edited by Katarzyna Bazarnik. He has developed his own literary

technique known as the emanative poem. He is half of the duo Zenkasi.

Katarzyna Bazarnik is a literary theorist, translator, and co-author of liberary books. She studies the work of James Joyce at the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of English Studies, where she is an Assistant Professor. She is the editor of the Liberature, series published by Ha!art and a co-founder of the Liberature Reading Room in Kraków. Along with Zenon Fajfer, Bazarnik published the triptych Oka-leczenie (2000–2009) and (O)patrzenie (2003), launching a liberary publishing series. She is the author of numerous articles on liberature, published in Poland and abroad. She is the editor and co-editor of Wokół Jamesa Joyce’a (1998), Od Joyce’a do liberatury (2002), James Joyce and After. Writer and Time (2010), and two issues of Literatura na Świecie devoted to the work of James Joyce (2004) and B.S. Johnson (2008). Her translation of the B.S. Johnson novel The Unfortunates won a distinction at the 2008 Wrocław Book Fair. She recently submitted her book Joyce and Liberature for printing, and is currently working on a monograph devoted to liberature. Her articles and lectures in Polish and international journals and conferences introduced the concept of liberature to academia. She is half of the duo Zenkasi.

6.30-7 PM

PICKETING POEM: LIBERATURE ON THE STREETS (Michigan Avenue)

7 PM

LIBERATURE IN TEN LETTERS

Zenon Fajfer presents his poetry. (Columbia College)

THE VENUE: CHOPIN THEATRE

1543 W Division, Chicago, IL 60642

773-278-1500 or info@chopintheatre.com www.chopintheatre.com

5 minutes from Downtown Chicago and accessible by: TRAIN (Blue Line, Division Exit), BUS (8 Ashland, 70 Division, 56 Milwaukee), OR CAR (Interstate 90/94 Division exit; 1 block West). COMPLIMENTARY PARKING: 1 block east of theater at Holy Trinity Church located at Division & Noble.

Chopin Theatre is an independent arts center in the heart of Chicago's artistic neighborhood, Wicker Park. Established in 1990, it has had approximately 1,400 events with over 7,000 presentations (5,000 theatrical, 900 film, 800 literary evenings and over 100 music, dance, visual arts and social events). Chopin Theatre has also produced over 110 of its own productions, mostly Eastern European, and has hosted performers from every state in the U.S. and from over 40 countries. Our many guests have included Pulitzer winners Gwendolyn Brooks, Yusef Komunyakaa and Studs Terkel; writers Stuart Dybek, Aleksander Hemon, Haki Madhubuti, Sara Paretsky, Art Shay, Zadie Smith, Bronislaw Wildstein and Adam Zagajewski; poets Nikki Giovanni, Luis Rodriguez and Mark Smith; actors John Cusak and JeremyPiven; musicians Grazyna Auguscik, Edward Auer, Peter Brotzman, Chuck D., Kurt Elling, Von Freeman, Fareed Haque and Rob Mazurek.

Chopin Theatre has also organized over 60 interviews or “Spotkania” with leading Polish and Polish American cultural and political figures.

Chopin Theatre produces I-Fest.com , an international festival of solo performances which has brought to Chicago 17 international artists from 10 countries -- Austria, England, Finland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ – FESTIVAL PATRON

Milosz was born on June, 30th 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania. A poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He won the Nobel Prize in 1980 and many other prestigious literary awards throughout his life, and has been translated into forty-two languages. He received honorary doctorates from universities in the USA and in Poland, and was made an honorary citizen of Lithuania and the City of Krakow. He spent his school days and university youth in Wilno (Vilnius), where he also made his debut as a poet, and lived out the German occupation in Warsaw. After the war he worked in the diplomatic service of the People’s Republic in the USA and in France until 1951, when he appealed for political asylum in Paris. In 1960 he left for California, where he spent twenty years as a professor of Slavic languages and literature, lecturing at Berkeley University. Until 1989 he mainly published in the Paris émigré journal Kultura and in the Polish underground press. After 1989 he lived in Berkeley and in Krakow. He died on August 14th 2004. Critics from many countries, as well as contemporary poets (like Joseph Brodsky, for instance), approach Milosz's literary output in superlatives. His poetry is rich in visual-symbolic metaphor. The idyllic and the apocalyptic go hand-to-hand. The verse

sometimes suggests naked philosophical discourse of religious epiphany. Songs and theological treatises alternate, as in the "child-like rhymes" about the German Occupation of Warsaw in The World: Naive Poems (1943) or Six Lectures in Verse from the volume Chronicles (1987). Milosz transcends genre. As a poet and translator, he moves easily from contemporary American poets to the Bible (portions of which he has rendered anew into Polish). As a novelist, he won renown with The Seizure of Power (1953), about the installation of communism in Poland. Both Milosz and his readers have a particular liking for the semi-autobiographical The Issa Valley (1955), a tale of growing up and the loss of innocence that abounds in philosophical sub-texts. There are also many personal themes in Milosz's essays, as well as in The Captive Mind (1953), a classic of the literature of totalitarianism. Native Realm (1959) remains one of the best studies of the evolution of the Central European mentality. The Land of Ulro (1977) is a sort of intellectual and literary autobiography. It was followed by books like The Witness of Poetry (1982), The Metaphysical Pause (1995) and Life on Islands (1997) that penetrate to the central issues of life and literature today.

ART DIRECTOR

Michał Paweł Markowski

Stefan and Lucy Hejna Chair in Polish Language and Literature

Professor and Head, Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures

University of Illinois at Chicago

University Hall 1630

601 South Morgan Street

Chicago IL 60607-7116

phone: (312) 996-44111

mobile: (312) 622-1540

FOUNDERS

TYGODNIK POWSZECHNY FOUNDATION

The main aim of the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation is to deepen and promote a democratic model for society based on Christian values. Among the other tasks of the foundation is custody of the Jerzy Turowicz archive and managing the legacy of the heritage and traditions of the Tygodnik Powszechny. The statute includes a number of other tasks, such as furthering freedom of speech and free and independent mass media, promoting reading and education, the extension and promotion of

Polish culture and science in Europe and the world; the documenting and archiving of Catholic social, cultural and scientific life,; supporting the development of Christian culture and teaching, organising educational and artistic activities and promoting such activities. The foundation has organised or assisted in organising a number of cultural events, such as musical concerts accompanying the annual St. George medal giving ceremony with contributions from Collegium Vocale Gent conducted by Philip Herrewegh and Kevin Kenner; the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Tygodnik Powszechny in 2005; and Days of the Tango Astor Piazzolla’s Music Festival in 2007. The foundation also inspired the creation of the PIAZZOFORTE project, awarded with the “Fryderyk” award, which combines Piazzolla’s music with the classical music of Bach and Chopin. The Foundation, together with the fr. J.Tischner European High School (Wyższa Szkoła Europejska im. Ks. J.Tischnera), is the organizer of a series of debates entitled “Uniwersytet Powszechny“ (“Universal University”) and together with Multikino and Kijów. Centrum it organises film premieres and special film screenings as well as workshops, courses and educational events. The TP foundation is also involved in financing the publishing and editorial aspects of the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. It is because of the Foundation’s contributions that the magazine issues supplements on different subjects and includes film and music discs. The foundation finances the maintenance and takes part in managing the Jerzy Turowicz archive in Krakow. This institution was created in January 1999 after the death of the Chief Editor of “TP” to save and use the enormous collection found in the home of Anna and Jerzy Turowicz. The archive has created a digital reprint of “TP” from the period of 1945 – 2005, a digital catalogue of J. Turowicz’s correspondence with over 1200 correspondents, and currently, based on his collections, there is a monograph being created of the life and works of the late co-founder and Chief Editor under the supervision of Tomasz Fiałkowski. The Foundation Chairman of the Board is Aleksander Kardyś, and the Foundation Board members are: Father Adam Boniecki, Wojciech Bonowicz, Piotr Mucharski, Michał Okoński and Wojciech Pięciak. The foundation was started on the 14th of June 2002 and was the sole owner of the Tygodnik Powszechny company. Since June 2007 the second partner and co-owner of the Tygodnik Powszechny company is ITI Impresario Holding. Since 2004 the Foundation has had the status of a public benefit organisation. The Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation together with the City of Krakow and the Krakow Festival Office is the official organizer of the Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival.

DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC AND BALTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES University of Illinois at Chicago http://www.uic.edu/depts/slav/index.html

PARTNERS

POLISH MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

CONSULATE GENERAL OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND IN CHICAGO

THE BOOK INSTITUTE, KRAKOW, POLAND

POLISH CULTURAL INSTITUTE, NYC

THE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES, LITERATURES AND CULTURAL STUDIES AT UIC

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT UIC

Further informations:

www.aftermilosz.com

Facebook.com/aftermilosz

Twitter.com/aftermilosz