Piotr Gwiazda

Professor, Director of the Literature Program

Piotr's Affiliations: Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies,  European Studies Center, Global Studies Center

Piotr Gwiazda received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University in 2001. 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 American Poetry Review, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Granta, Jacket2,  Lana Turner, The Nation, The Seattle Review, and the TLS.

Recent scholarship includes:

“Ghosts and Anchors: Translingualism in Contemporary U.S. Poetry.” Criticism 63.3 (Spring 2021)

“A Translational Poetics?” Forum on 21st Century American Poetics. Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 13 (2021)

“Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville (University of Edinburgh Press, 2021).

“The Forest of Language: Etymological Play in Leonard Schwartz’s The New Babel.” Talisman 48 (2020).

“‘The Dead Will Think the Living Are Worth It’: Rereading W.S. Merwin’s The Lice.” American Poetry Review (July/August 2019)

Teaching

Undergraduate:

  • American Literature
  • The Dramatic Imagination
  • Reading Poetry
  • Words and Images
  • Docupoetry
  • Emily Dickinson (Project Seminar)
  • The Waste Land and Its Contexts (Project Seminar)
  • Peace Writing/Writing Peace (Senior Seminar)

Graduate:

  • Readings in Contemporary Poetry
  • Translation and World Literature
Research Interests

Poetry and poetics, American literature, intertextuality studies, peace studies, poetry and pedagogy, reader response theory, creative writing, literary translation