From: Anntonette Zembrsuski Alberti, PolishFest Cultural Committee Chair
[email protected] · 518-369-2100
Date: February 1, 2018
Re: Latham NY’s PolishFest Announces 2018 Book Club Selections
June 1-3, 2018, PolishFest will return to 250 Old Maxwell Road, Latham, NY. The Capital Region’s largest celebration of Polish and Polish-American culture will once again feature its popular PolishFest Book Club. Festival goers are encouraged to buy the books and read them before the festival. The authors will be speaking, selling and signing books at the festival and there will be the opportunity to discuss the books with other literary-minded festival goers. And yes, they do serve that essential book club staple, wine, at PolishFest (as well as many varieties of Polish beer).
This year’s PolishFest Book Club selections are: echoes of tattered tongues: memory unfolded, by John Guzlowski, The Best Polish Restaurant in Buffalo, by William Kowalski, and Grace Revealed, by Greg Archer.
For more information about PolishFest, visit www.PolishFest-NY.org, or www.facebook.com/PolishFestNY.
echoes of tattered tongues: memory unfolded, by John Z. Guzlowski:
In this major tour de force, Guzlowski traces the arc of one millions of immigrant families of America, in this case, survivors of the maelstrom of World War II. Through a haunting collage—poems, prose and prose poems, frozen moments of time, sometimes dreamlike and surreal, other times realistic and graphic—the story unfolds backwards through time.
This is the story of Guzlowski’s own family: his parents were taken as slave laborers by the Germans and barely survived; his sister and he were born in Displaced Persons camps. Raw and at the same time compassionate, Guzlowski illuminates a hidden facet of World War II and reflects the many ways in which trauma echoes through time, leaving us with a deeper more visceral understanding of the human costs of war.
echoes of tattered tongues: memory unfolded is the winner of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin GOLD AWARD for Poetry and the winner of the 2017 MONTAIGNE MEDAL for Most Thought-Provoking Book.
The Best Polish Restaurant in Buffalo, by William Kowalski
A masterful blend of historical and modern fiction by a best-selling, award-winning author, The Best Polish Restaurant in Buffalo chronicles a century of life in America for one humble Polish farm girl and three generations of her descendants in Buffalo, New York.
William Kowalski is the author of the international best-seller Eddie’s Bastard (HarperCollins, 1999), the best-seller Somewhere South of Here (HarperCollins, 2001), and twelve other novels. He is the recipient of the 1999 Rosenstein Award, the 2001 Ama-Boeke Award, the 2014 Thomas H. Raddall Award, and three nominations for the Ontario Library Association’s Golden Oak Award. He was also the co-author of Coyote Beach, winner of the 21st Century Filmmaker Award at the Avignon/New York Film Festival. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. A descendant of three generations of Buffalo Polish-Americans, he was raised in Erie, PA and now lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with his wife and two children.
Grace Revealed, by Greg Archer
Seventy-five years after Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror across Eastern Europe, entertainment journalist Greg Archer takes a step back from Hollywood and examines his Polish family’s mind-bending odyssey of the 1940s. In the process, he exposes one of the most under-reported events of the 20th Century: Stalin’s mass deportation of nearly two million Polish citizens to the Siberian gulags and the life-shattering events that followed.
But the author’s quest takes a dramatic turn. As he walks an emotional tightrope between the past and the present, can a serendipitous global adventure become a saving grace, heal the ancestral soul and bring justice to his family and their forgotten Polish comrades?
Greg Archer is an author, multimedia journalist, and public speaker. Grace Revealed as been heralded by Huffington Post as being “haunting and heartfelt,” it reveals the lengths family members would go to save their own offspring. He is currently exploring creating a documentary on the subject. Greg regularly speaks to groups about his serendipitous life in the entertainment industry, making revealing connections to inherited legacies and family history. His work spotlighting Agents of Change, and culture vultures near and far, is featured regularly in Huffington Post, Gannett’s USA Today Network, Live Happy Magazine and other media and television outlets.
