FALL 2025

New Voices in Polish Literature: Feminist and Queer Narratives in Independent Publishing
​September 10, 7 pm

Krystyna Wieszczek. "Orwell on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain: The Story of Poland"
October 9, 7 pm

Tadeusz Dąbrowski. The Scent of Man. Poetry reading and book talk 
November 3, 7 pm 

Un/Filmed School. Students' Showcase and Q&A
December 8, 7 pm
"New Voices in Polish Literature: Feminist and Queer Narratives in Independent Publishing," with Maria Halber, Aleksandra Kamińska, and Monika Zaleska.  Wednesday, September 10, 7 pm. Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126 Hunter West Building). Co-organized by the Polish Cultural Institute of New York. Free and open to the public.

Feminist and queer voices are flourishing in the 2020s Polish literary scene, especially in independent publishing. Emerging from DIY practices and gaining recognition through major literary awards, feminist and queer authors create a new narrative landscape where literature, art, and activism intersect. How to create space for feminist and queer voices despite the conservative turn? And how can translation serve as a tool for community-building across borders? 

Join us for a discussion and reading with Maria Halber—editor and author of the award-winning novel Strużki [Trickle], the recipient of the Conrad Prize for best fiction debut; Aleksandra Kamińska—scholar and co-founder of the queer small press Girls and Queers to the Front; and Monika Zaleska—writer, translator, and literary scholar. Together, they will discuss the role of activism in literature, opposing mainstream narratives about minorities in Central Eastern Europe, making poetry and fiction political, bilingual publishing, and tracing the growing recognition of feminist and queer narratives in both Polish and American literature.

Maria Halber is a poet, writer, and editor. She made her literary debut with the poetry collection Przejścia (Staromiejski Dom Kultury, 2020), followed by her first novel, Strużki (Cyranka, 2023), which received the Conrad Prize for best prose debut. A recipient of the Adam Włodek Scholarship from the Wisława Szymborska Foundation, she is also a part of the Girls and Queers to the Front initiative. Her work has been featured in Pismo, Dwutygodnik, Mały Format, and Wizje. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Aleksandra Kamińska, PhD, is a scholar, publisher, and activist based in Warsaw. She is a co-founder of the Girls and Queers to the Front initiative (@girlsandqueerstothefront). Since 2015, GQTTF has been creating space for queer and women artists, writers, and musicians by organizing workshops, concerts, performances, readings, and curating exhibitions. Kamińska’s research and artistic practices explore life narratives, girl as an identity category, and feminist modes of production. She is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. 

​Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and PhD candidate at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she was fiction editor of The Brooklyn Review and taught in the English department. She now teaches Polish literature at Hunter College.

Directions: Please sign in as a guest at the lobby of the Hunter West Building. This event is on floor B1, room B126 (Insdorf Screening Room). From the entrance, please take one floor down on the escalator. 
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Krystyna Wieszczek. "Orwell on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain: The Story of Poland." Book talk. Thursday, October 9, 7 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Hunter East Building (7th Floor). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Celebrating the Banned Books Week 2025 and the recent publication of George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions (2025), the lecture will explore the complex Polish reception of this iconic author, who is also the theme of this year’s Banned Books Week. It will examine the translation and dissemination efforts in the West, as well as the creative smuggling methods – such as miniature editions, balloons, false covers, and diplomatic bags – that were used to bring Orwell’s works and ideas into Poland. The lecture will further explore why activists risked their lives for Orwell, engaging in underground printing, distribution, and reading. Finally, we will discuss the surprising ways Orwell’s work and name managed to appear in official, state-sanctioned culture as well, despite the long-standing ban, and how the ban itself contributed to sanctioning Orwell’s mythos as a symbol of resistance that inspired generations of rebels.
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Krystyna Wieszczek is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Verona, Italy, and Columbia University, New York. She specializes in twentieth-century English literature and literary translation, reception and censorship. Her current project investigates empirical reception and the potential impact of literature on empowerment. Previously, she taught at the University of Bologna and the Ignatianum Academy in Krakow, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Milan. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Southampton, UK.

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center. Hunter East Building, 7th Floor 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Tadeusz Dąbrowski. The Scent of Man. Bilingual poetry reading and book talk. Monday, November 3, 7 pm. Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126 Hunter West Building). Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. Free and open to the public.

Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s poetry is as beguiling, reflective and precise as a thousand fragments of a shattered mirror. The poet is properly suspicious of the ambiguities concealed in all language: “very dangerous to know/too many words.//Each of them has its/flip side, which/also has its flip side/and so on ad infinitum.” Whether gazing at art or looking at laundry, meditating on our cravings for bread or literature, the poems move effortlessly between the mundane and the exalted, suggesting that the messiness of human experience, its visceral realities, the carnal truths of the body, our small joys and inevitable decay, are all part of the same fragile narrative. The Scent of Man, masterfully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, moves intimately through spaces sacred and profane, suggesting we are never fully in one world or the other but ever adrift in between.

Tadeusz Dąbrowski (b. 1979) is a poet, essayist, critic. Editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Agni, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Guernica, among others. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the Omi International Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He has been nominated for the NIKE Award (2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Author of ten volumes of poetry in his native Polish, from which the most recent are Scrabble (2020) and To jest fajka (2022) [This is a pipe], and a dozen in translation. He has also published a novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenseless line], set in New York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitled In Metaphor (2024). Two of his collections, Black Square and POSTS have been published in English by Zephyr Press. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.

PRAISE

Tadeusz Dąbrowski is in poetry what the French call le grand reporter. He has the temperament of a realist but his realism is of a poetic nature, it leads to a revelation, not to accusation. His poems achieve an astonishing degree of density which is an adequate response to the absurdity of our world. A remarkable collection of poems! (Adam Zagajewski) 

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Chanin Language Center (room B126 Hunter West Building). 

Directions: Please sign in as a guest at the lobby of the Hunter West Building. This event is on floor B1, room B126 (Insdorf Screening Room). From the entrance, please take one floor down on the escalator. 
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Un/Filmed School. Students' Showcase and Q&A. Monday, December 8, 7 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Hunter East Building (7th Floor). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Un/Filmed School invites you to a showcase of bold new short documentaries created by emerging Russian filmmakers in exile. Founded in New York City in 2021, Un/Filmed School is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering marginalized, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and anti war Russian creators across 22 countries through inclusive documentary training led by internationally recognized instructors.

This special screening at Hunter College features four deeply personal and yet timely and unapologetically honest works: Voiceless by Saadat Sataeva; She Became a Pillar of Salt by Xenia Shipit; One Day by Evgeniia Borisova; and Memory Is Me? by Vlada Lodesk. The four shorts, each ten to fifteen minutes, run a total of fifty five minutes, followed by a thirty minute Q&A with filmmakers Vlada Lodesk and Evgeniia Borisova via Zoom, and Un/Filmed founder Victor Ilyukhin in person.

Join us for an evening of courageous storytelling and rare perspectives seldom seen in mainstream media! 

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center. Hunter East Building, 7th Floor 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: [email protected]