Gerard Wozek

Gerard Wozek is the author of A Little Wounded But On Fire,a book of poems published by Tebot Bach Press in 2022. His short story collection, Postcards from Heartthrob Town (Southern Tier Editions, 2006) is a sensual collage of short travel vignettes. His debut book of poems, Dervish (Gival Press, 2001), won the Gival Press Poetry Book Award. A hand bound chapbook,The Changeling’s Exile (Deep Wood Press, 2010), featuring original engravings by artist Chad Pastotnik, is available online in a limited edition.

Wozek contributed the text to Flutter and Spin,a poetry video created along with poet Kelsey Bryan-Zwick for the 2023 International Poetry Video Festival held in Los Angeles, California. The film took an Honorable Mention Award and screens online at https://poetryfilmfestival.org/the-films-of-awards

Along with filmmaker Mary Russell, Wozek has produced nearly a dozen award winning poetry videos which have screened around the world. Most recently, he collaborated on the video poem, Not Death but Love, which is a tribute to English Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The film was juried into the 2021 Athens Video Poetry Festival, where it premiered over the summer.

In 2020, Wozek was featured in the compilation, Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press, 2020), edited by Megan Volpert. Wozek’s coming-of-age narrative: “History of My Underwear” deals with issues of strict identity conformity and compliance.

The Ekphrastic Writer, edited by Janee J. Baugher (McFarland Press, 2020), highlights two of Wozek’s original poems based on the visual work of Eva Gonzalès (“Girl with Cherries”) and Katsushika Hokusai (“A Peasant Crossing a Bridge”), as well as including his brief discourse on the craft of writing ekphrastically.

The Lockdown Haiku Project was completed in 2020 and is comprised of 21 black and white photographs taken by scholar Isaias Fanlo and 21 haiku written by Wozek—a total of 42 pieces—altogether they form an interdisciplinary, international call-and-response collaboration that articulates an immediate catharsis in these challenging days we are living. The duo's offering appears online in the Pendemic Literary Journal.

Gerard Wozek embraced twenty-five years as a full-time Professor of English and Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Robert Morris University Illinois.

He is following his heart to Barcelona, Spain to live near the sea.