Piotr Gwiazda

Piotr Gwiazda received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University in 2001. Prior to joining the department in 2017, he taught at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). He specializes in poetry and poetics, with additional interests in American literature, intertextuality studies, peace studies, poetry and pedagogy, reader response theory, creative writing, and literary translation.
Research and Publications
Professor Gwiazda is the author of two critical studies, US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He has published three volumes of poetry: Aspects of Strangers (Moria Books, 2015), Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012), and Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005). He has also translated two books by the Polish writer Grzegorz Wróblewski, Zero Visibility (Phoneme Media, 2017) and Kopenhaga (Zephyr Press, 2013). His essays, reviews, poems, and translations have appeared in many journals, including Asymptote, Chicago Review, Granta, Jacket2, The Nation, Postmodern Culture, The Seattle Review, and the TLS.
Teaching
Undergraduate:
- American Literature
- Reading Poetry
- Words and Images
- The Dramatic Imagination
- Peace Writing/Writing Peace (Senior Seminar)
- Docupoetry
Graduate:
- Readings in Contemporary Poetry
- Translation and World Literature




