2025: Grzegorz Kwiatkowski from Poland
RSVP to hear Grzegorz Kwiatkowski read his work at Busboys and Poets on September 29th, 2025 here.
RSVP to hear Grzegorz Kwiatkowski in conversation with Randi Ward at 12 pm on September 30th 2025 at GMU here.
Write to Leeya Mehta about joining us for a private in home salon in support of the Cheuse Center's 10th year anniversary, on October 4th, here: lmehta@gmu.edu
Featured Panel, 12PM on Sept 30:
A Matter of Record: reclaiming histories through poetry
Accounts from Poland, West Virginia, and the Faroe Islands
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Randi Ward are celebrated contemporary artists known for drawing parallels between historical traumas in their communities and the alarming trajectories of current global events. Both poets render matrices of perspectives and generational trauma through polyphonic texts, poems that challenge readers to not only bear witness but become interlocutors.
From Stutthof concentration camp in Poland to the toxic dump sites of DuPont’s Washington Works chemical plant in West Virginia, the disturbing immediacy of Kwiatkowski and Ward’s stark work reminds us that the past is never just the past. Its political and historical legacies are constantly taking shape before our very eyes: in the hyper-exploitation of the environment and marginalized peoples the world over, in the divisive rhetoric increasingly permeating our everyday lives.
In light of this, the authors will discuss the modalities and materialities that they have experimented with in their creative work to not only expose mechanisms of violence, but remedy injustice. Kwiatkowski will read from his acclaimed poetry collection Crops (translated into English by Peter Constantine), as well as from his new English manuscript Without an Orchestra. He will also present poems written during his Yale Artist-in-Residence project this year, based on Holocaust testimonies. In addition, Kwiatkowski will speak about his memory activism in Gdańsk and at the Stutthof concentration camp site, where he discovered, near the museum fence, almost half a million pairs of shoes—most of them still decaying in plain sight—that had belonged to Jewish victims. He continues to fight for their protection, exhibition, and commemoration.
Ward will read from her project-in-progress Groundwork, then present an excerpt of Faroese poet Kim Simonsen’s What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium. Simonsen’s collection demonstrates how we can resist systemic forces that have estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems by reconceptualizing humankind—as a species among species—within the greater kinship of matter.
More about Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, the Cheuse Center’s Visiting Artist: Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a distinguished Polish poet, musician, academic, and human rights activist. He is the Fortunoff Video Archive Artist-in-Residence in 2025 at Yale University, where he also collaborates with Peter Cole. Kwiatkowski has earned international recognition for both his poetry and his activism. His literary works, including the acclaimed collection Crops, tackle profound themes of violence, genocide, and human rights. Translated by Peter Constantine, Crops has been published in the United States, and beyond. Kwiatkowski’s poetry is not merely a reflection on the past, but an urgent call to confront the realities of hatred and violence in the present. He conducts readings and speaks regularly at universities around the world. Kwiatkowski is also an activist who helped uncover nearly half a million pairs of shoes left to decay near the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Kwiatkowski has been fighting for the site to be preserved and recognized officially as a site of memory. During his residency at the Fortunoff Archive, Kwiatkowski will combine testimony, historical research, and his artistic vision to create a new work that speaks to the enduring importance of remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust. He plans to exhibit this work in both Gdańsk and at Yale University, further bridging the historical connection between Poland and the wider world.