Piotr Gwiazda, an associate professor of English, has been selected for a prestigious list “Best Books of Poetry in English 2015.” The list was compiled by Adam Zdrodowski, a poet and translator who has published three collections of poetry and translated authors such as Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs.

The list included six top poetry books published in 2015 from around the world, including Gwiazda’s Aspects of Strangers which received strong praise from Zdrodowski: “At first, the poems may seem simple, and yet it quickly turns out their simplicity is misleading. Simple phrases keep building up, bringing new pieces of information, sometimes corroborating and sometimes undermining what went before; phrases are sometimes repeated in different contexts, adding to the complex picture of contemporary humans struggling with the paradoxes and pleasures of contemporaneity.”

The book is Gwiazda’s third book of poetry. His areas of interest include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, poetic theory, creative writing, literary translation and translation theory, intertextuality studies, U.S. literature and culture, and world literature. He has received grants and fellowships from the PEN American Center (The PEN/Heim Translation Fund), National Humanities Center (Summer Institute in Literary Studies), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities. He won the Washington Writers’ Publishing Poetry Contest for Gagarin Street in 2005.

Read more about Gwiazda’s work on the English department website. Read more about the six best books of poetry in 2015.