Meadows of Memory

Lidia Kosk, poet, writer, educator, lawyer, and photographer, is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, and two anthologies. Her collaboration with her daughter, the poet and translator Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, resulted in two bilingual volumes: Niedosyt/Reshapings (Oficyna Dziennikarzy i Literatów POD WIATR, 2003) and Słodka woda, słona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water (ASTRA, 2009). The latter book has been translated into Japanese by Hiroko Tsuji and Izumi Nakamura, and published in Japan in 2016. Lidia collaborated with her husband, Henryk P. Kosk, on the two-volume Poland's Generals: A Popular Biographical Lexicon (Ajaks, 1998, 2001). Her most recent book is Szklana góra/Glass Mountain (Komograf, 2017), edited by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka. The book comprises renditions of her poem "Szklana góra" in twenty-two languages, ranging from Arabic to Italian to Occitan to Russian, as well as to a work of visual art for the cover. The translators, hailing from several countries on three continents, were thrilled by the poem. Lidia's poem brought them all together to celebrate the power of poetry and connectedness throughout the world. Recently, music professor Sal Ferrantelli composed the score for "Szklana góra." The world premiere performance of the song by the soprano Laura Kafka-Price was in May 2019 at the Arts Club in Washington, DC. As was typical of her generation, Lidia Kosk came of age during World War II and survived first the Nazi occupation of Poland, and then the Stalinist regime imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union. Her poetry bears witness to history and at the same time is an affirmation of life. Lidia's poems and prose have been published in literary journals and anthologies in the USA, Poland, Russia and Japan; discussed and reviewed in English-, Polish- and Japanese-language publications; and featured on public radio in the USA and Poland, and in multimedia video presentations. In 2012, for Mother's Day, the National Public Radio station WYPR's The Signal broadcast a program featuring her, speaking from her Warsaw apartment, and her daughter-translator in the studio in Baltimore. Composer Philip A. Olsen translated a series of her poems into choral compositions and the McDonogh School choir has performed them in several countries, including the USA, Peru, Portugal, and Spain. Olsen's "Polish Triptych" comprising his three choral compositions to Danuta's translations of Lidia's poems premiered in Baltimore in May 2017. Lidia resides in Warsaw, Poland, where she leads literary workshops and a Poets' Theater (ATP). For more see: http://gm.kosk.xyz/ and danutakk.wordpress.com/about-lidia-kosk/

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is the author of the prize-winning poetry collection Oblige the Light (CityLit Press, 2015) and Face Half-Illuminated (Apprentice House Press, 2015), a book of poems, translations, and prose. She is the translator for two bilingual books by Lidia Kosk, nominated for various translation prizes. Danuta has also edited two books, most recently Szklana góra/Glass Mountain, featuring Lidia Kosk's poem in twenty-two languages. Her English-language poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies in the USA and in several European countries. Likewise, her Polish-language poems have been published in Poland in Akcent and Więź, as well as in the US-based Przegląd Polski, the literary weekly supplement to the largest Polish-language daily in North America. Her poems were also featured in the NPR program "The Signal" during a joint interview with Lidia Kosk focused on her translations of Lidia's poetry. Over the years, in addition to Lidia Kosk, she went on to translate various Polish voices, including Ernest Bryll, author of numerous volumes of poetry, plays, and prose; Wisława Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel laureate; and recently Marcin Świetlicki, a contemporary poet and musician, as well as Grzegorz Białkowski, a poet and physicist. Since 1997, over seventy of her translations have appeared in the USA, in journals including Notre Dame Review, The Fourth River, Subtropics, and the Tupelo Press; in various anthologies; and on National Public Radio. Her translations have also gone in the other direction, from English to Polish, leading to the publication of her translations of three Maryland Poets Laureate-Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan-in Poland in 2006. She is a founding member of DC-ALT (the Washington, DC area branch of the US national association of translators), which she has represented in events at the Writers' Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Columbia Festival of Arts. She has organized and led translators' panels at the CityLit Festival at Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, in 2014; and at the Confluence: Translations in the Capital Area conferences at Montgomery College, in 2015 and 2017. Life in two languages, bridging the cultural divide between Poland and the United States, has allowed her the unique opportunity to translate poetry and to inhabit the distinctive worlds and linguistic idioms of those countries. At Loch Raven Review, as the editor of the poetry translations section, she has focused on bilingual publications, one language per issue. Since 2011 she has presented poets, and their English translators, representing 19 languages, as diverse as Portuguese, Contemporary Mayan, TItalian, Kurdish, Catalan, and most recently, Ukrainian and Arabic. Born and raised in Poland, she arrived in the USA in 1980, after receiving her PhD in biochemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences. The imposition of martial law in her motherland on December 13, 1981, was the reason that she settled permanently in the USA. She resides in Catonsville, Maryland. For more information see http://danutakk.wordpress.com.