John Guzlowski

After attending the University of Illinois in Chicago, he completed a PhD in American literature at Purdue University. He taught literature and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and retired in 2005.

John Guzlowski received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry from the Independent Book Publishers Association and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award for Thought Provoking writing for his memoir in prose and poetry Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded. He was also the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award in 2001. In 2012, he received the Polish American Historical Association Creative Arts Award for his writing and his contribution to Polish American Letters.

Guzlowski earned his PhD in English at Purdue University in 1980, and is now retired from Eastern Illinois University, where he taught contemporary American literature and poetry writing. His poems deal with his parents' experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. He has authored three books about his parents' experiences: Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press). These books continue the story of his parents that began in his chapbook Language of Mules which was republished as Język Mułów i Inne Wiersze, a Polish-English edition of this chapbook and other poems, and published by Biblioteka Śląska in Katowice, Poland. His poem "What My Father Believed" was read by Garrison Keillor on the Writers Almanac program. Other poems have appeared in a number of periodicals in the US, Poland, and Hungary, including North American Review, Rattle, Atticus Review, Salon, Margie, Nimrod, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Slask, and Ackent.

His parents, his sister Donna, and he came to the US as DPs in 1951. After working on farms in western New York State to pay off their passage to America, they eventually settled in Chicago in the city's old Polish Downtown in the vicinity of St. Fidelis Parish in Humboldt Park.

He is also the author of three mystery novels set in a Polish-American neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s: Suitcase Charlie and Little Altar Boys and Murdertown (all from Kasva Press). He has also written Retreat: A Love Story, a novel about two German Lovers separated during World War II.

John Guzlowski (born 1948) is a Polish-American author.

His mother Tekla Hanczarek came from a small community west of Lviv in what was then Poland where her father was a forest warden. His father Jan was born in a farming community north of Poznań. John was born Zbigniew Guzlowski in a Displaced Persons camp in Vienenburg, Germany in 1948, and changed his name to John when he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1968.