Andrew Zawacki is an Americanpoet, critic, editor, and translator. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Fellow in Poetry. Zawacki's first book, By Reason of Breakings, won the 2001 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series, chosen by Forrest Gander. Work from his second book, Anabranch, was awarded the 2002 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. The volume also includes his 2001 chapbook Masquerade, selected by C.D. Wright to receive the 2002 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. "Georgia," a long poem opening Zawacki's third book, Petals of Zero Petals of One, won the 1913 Prize and was published in 1913: a journal of forms, with short introductions by Peter Gizzi and Cole Swensen. He has held fellowships from the Collège International des Traducteurs Littéraires and the Résidence internationale Ville de Paris / Institut Français aux Récollets in France, the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, Le Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria, the University of Paris IV—La Sorbonne in France, the Slovenian Writers' Association in Slovenia, the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Zawacki has coedited the international literary magazine Verse with Brian Henry since 1995 and has taught at the University of Georgia since 2005.
Life and work
Zawacki was educated at the College of William and Mary and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. A former Fulbright Scholar to Australia, he earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Zawacki is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Along with Andrew Joron, Zawacki is the literary co-executor of poet, novelist, and essayist Gustaf Sobin. Zawacki's essays and reviews have appeared in national and international journals, among them the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Review, Chicago Review, How2, Open Letter, Australian Book Review, New German Critique, P.N. Review, and elsewhere. He edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995, the first comprehensive anthology of Slovenian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction to appear in the US, as well as editing and co-translating Aleš Debeljak's new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia. He is also the translator, from the French, of poet and psychoanalyst Sébastien Smirou's books See About: Bestiary and My Lorenzo, published in 2012 by Burning Deck with an introduction by Jennifer Moxley. Zawacki has earned translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Centre National du Livre, and French Voices, and has also translated Abdellatif Laâbi, Philippe Soupault, and Anne Portugal. Translated into French by Sika Fakambi, Georgia was published in France in 2009 by Éditions de l'Attente, who also brought out Carnet Bartleby, in Fakambi's translation, in 2012. The French edition of Zawacki's first book, Par Raison de brisants, translated by Antoine Cazé, was issued by Éditions Grèges in 2011 and was a finalist for Le Prix Nelly Sachs. Translated by Anne Portugal, Sonnetssonnants appeared in a bilingual edition in the Collection américaine from Joca Seria. He is of Polish descent.
