16th Annual Slapering Hol Press War & Peace Reading featuring John Guzlowski, Usha Akella, & Angela Dribben (via Zoom)

Join the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee as they commemorate Veterans Day with a Hudson Valley Writers Center reading via Zoom. The keynote readers will be John Guzlowski, Usha Akella, and Angela Dribben.

This reading will take place via Zoom. Please register to get the Zoom link which will be sent immediately at the time of registration via email. Please check your spam filter and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions. This reading is FREE though donations are greatly appreciated!

John Guzlowski will be reading his astonishing poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees making a life for themselves in Chicago from his collection, Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica Press). Echoes of Tattered Tongues won the 2017 Ben Franklin Award for Poetry and the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Award for most thought-provoking work of 2017. In reviewing Guzlowski’s book, Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Exceptional…even astonished me…reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.”

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction. His poems and stories have appeared in national journals including North American Review, Ontario Review, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, and Marge. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac. His books include Language of Mules (DP Press), Jezyk mulów i inne wiersze (Biblioteka Śląska), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press), Suitcase Charlie (Kasva Press), Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica), Little Altar Boy (Kasva Press), and True Confessions: 1965 to Now (Darkhouse Press). Road of Bones, his novel about two German lovers separated by war, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. He was the winner of the Illinois Arts Council’s $7,500 Award for Poetry. He has been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust and the Central Virginia Holocaust Educators for his work on telling the story of slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia with his wife, daughter, and granddaughter. 

Usha Akella has authored four books of poetry, one chapbook, and scripted/produced two musical dramas. She earned a Master of Studies (Mst) in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the founder of Matwaala (www.matwaala.com) and hosts www.the-pov.com, an interview and conversations website. Matwaala is the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US that she co-directs with Pramila Venkateswaran. She is also the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin.

Usha Akella writes with ‘Sanskrit mantras in her veins,’ from an exceedingly broad perspective – as feminist, activist, organizer, poet-citizen, engaging an intellect profoundly contemporary with the times. She spans a long reach, from the looming questions and fears around our intense and out of control pandemic to India’s National trauma in the Delhi rape case. ‘Each of us is a naïve question as we always have been/curved like an embryo.’ She probes, she thinks with each situation, she grapples with the world in all its manifestations, also as a mother, poised in anticipation of what may come, but always with a steady heart and hand and ear in poetry. One line sent chills up my spine, as she contemplates all kinds of extinctions. An image of Virginia Woolf ‘inching into the Ouse.’ We are truly at precipice and this poetry can help wake up the world to itself. Kudos.” —Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism and Extinction Aria

Angela Dribben’s debut collection, Everygirl, a finalist for the 2020 Dogfish Head Prize, was published by Main Street Rag in May 2021. She is Contributing Review Editor at Cider Press Review and Director of Internal Affairs at Southern Collective Experience. Her poetry, essays, mixed media, and reviews can be found or are forthcoming in Cave Wall, EcoTheo, Deep South, San Pedro River Review, Crab Creek Review, Crack the Spine, fatal flaw, up the staircase quarterly, patchwork lit, and others.