Andrew Zawacki

Andrew Zawacki is the author of six poetry books: These Late Eclipses (Verge, due 2025), Unsun : f/11 (Coach House, 2019); Videotape (Counterpath, 2013); Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009); Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004); and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2002). The 2018 recipient of the university's Albert Christ-Janer Award for creative research, he was a 2016 Howard Foundation Fellow in Poetry. A former Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, Zawacki earned his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and coedited the international journal VERSE from 1995 to 2019. He is currently a fellow in the photobook Long Term Program offered by the Penumbra Foundation and Image Threads Collective.

Zawacki has also published four books in France: Sonnetssonnants, translated by Anne Portugal; Georgia and Carnet Bartleby, both translated by Sika Fakambi; and Par Raison de brisants, translated by Antoine Cazé and a finalist for the Prix Nelly Sachs. Anabranche, translated by Sika Fakambi, is forthcoming.

His chapbook Georgia was co-winner of the 1913 Prize, while Masquerade won the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Arrow's shadow is out from Equipage in the UK, and Kaeshi-waza was published in Canada by The Elephants. Sonnensonnets appeared from Tammy, Waterfall plot from Greying Ghost. His work has appeared in Poems for Political Disaster, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Great American Prose Poems, The Eloquent Poem, and other anthologies, as well as magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic.

A past fellow of the Slovenian Writers' Association, Zawacki edited Afterwards, an anthology of postwar Slovenian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, in addition to editing and co-translating Aleš Debeljak's new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia (Persea, 2011), assisted by a Slovenian Ministry of Culture Translation Grant. His translations of two poetry books by Sébastien Smirou, See About (La Presse / Fence, 2017) and My Lorenzo (Burning Deck, 2012), have earned him a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a French Voices Grant, and a grant from the Centre National du Livre.

He coedited the late expatriate writer Gustaf Sobin's collected poems and serves as co-executor of Sobin's literary estate. Zawacki has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Chicago Review, How2, Jacket2, New German Critique, and elsewhere. He has held fellowships from the Salzburg Seminar, the Bogliasco Foundation, la Résidence Internationale aux Récollets, le Collège International des Traducteurs Littéraires, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, and the Millay Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and Bread Loaf.

Zawacki is working on a quartet of projects. "Of A Succinct and Formal Violence" is a photo book in progress which confronts the Georgia landscape. "Paris Photo Graff" is a prose-photography hybrid that interlaces photos of Paris wall scrawl with episodic meditations on open-source literary communities and semi-hidden sub-cultures, the commercialization of street art, the hermeneutics of rumor and secrecy, authorial absence, the social relation of graffiti to political change, and the history of documenting graffiti. Zawacki is also completing a pair of translations from the French: one is Anne Portugal's latest poetry volume, s&lfies, the other Pierre Bergounioux’s cult classic B-17 G, a récit about air war, modernity as a function of speed, and the instant of death.

Frequently involving a second discipline and sometimes cross-listed with other departments, Zawacki’s writing workshops and topics seminars range widely. His creative writing workshops have addressed the prose poem, writing and photography, literary translation in theory and practice, the poetics of ruination and erasure, articulating the present tense, locutions of location, and the poetic sequence. His topics courses tend to confront the history of ideas. Among recent seminars he has directed are: "Fathers and Daughters," "Antigones," "Friendship and Death," "Afterwar: Bachmann and Celan," "At the white heat: Dickinson and Lispector," "Writing on the Wall: Graffiti," "Sade and the 20th Century," "The Vietnam War and The American Imaginary," and Proust's In Search of Lost Time.