America Presents

Professor Karen Kovacik

Karen Kovacik holds a Fulbright Research Grant to work on translation of contemporary Polish poetry into English at Warsaw University, Faculty of Polish Philology.

From 1985 through 1987, she lived in Warsaw, and has published translations of contemporary Polish poetry in American Poetry Review and Poetry East. In 1998, her chapbook Nixon and I was published by Kent State University Press, and a full-length collection, Beyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, was published by Kent State in 1999. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including a guest fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Institute for Creative Writing, Arts Council of Indianapolis Creative Renewal Fellowship, a Glimmer Train Very Short Story Award, the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize, and the Chelsea Prize for Short Fiction. Her poems and stories have appeared in many journals, including Salmagundi, Chelsea, Glimmer Train, Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis. Currently, she is at work on a new collection of poems, in part based on her experience of Warsaw, called Metropolis Burning.