Poetry Night: Bronislava Volková

November 19, 2024, 6:00 PM

The Czech and Slovak Society of Arts and Sciences DMV, Embassy of the Czech Republic, and Plamen Press present author Bronislava Volková's new poetry collection Where Everyone Leaves Never to Return on November 19, at 6 pm, at the Czech Embassy. Join us for a fascinating evening with the author.

About the Collection:
Where Everyone Leaves, Never to Return is a captivating collection of poems in which Czech poet Bronislava Volková, a jongleur of contemporary verse, masterfully combines voice and nuance as she saunters through love, loss, mortality, and eternal life. With a sharp wit, her verses render playful catechisms of why “a loving God can make an unloving man “ but they also dive deep into self-discovery, achieving, even if just for an instant, the hard-earned right to a “joyous spirit of inner being.“ Her work is a testament to her life lived in full–a diverse and all-encompassing experience.

About the Author:
Bronislava Volková is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist, and Professor Emerita at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she was a director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg, and subsequently at Harvard and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has published eleven books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and seven bilingual editions illustrated with her own collages. She is also the author of two books on linguistic and literary semiotics: Emotive Signs in Language (John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1987) and A Feminist’s Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 1997), as well as lead translator and editor (with Clarice Cloutier) of a large anthology of Czech poetry translations, Up the Devil’s Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (Slavica Publishers, Bloomington, 2008). Her newest book is Forms of Exile in Central European Jewish Literature and Thought (Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2021; Czech edition by Pavel Mervart, Prague, 2022). Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages, six of them as books. Since 2000, she has also been active as a collage artist and director of multimedia poetry performances. She has received a number of international literary and cultural awards and is a member of the Czech and American PEN clubs. She returned to her native country in 2018 and currently lives in Prague.

Event Details:

Date/Time: November 19, 2024, at 6 pm

Venue: Embassy of the Czech Republic
3900 Spring of Freedom Street, NW
Washington, DC 20008

RSVP required: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-czech-poet-bronislava-volkova-tickets-1047095279167