About Maria
Poet, editor and translator, Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw, Poland and came to England as a child. Her most recent, fifth full length collection is Small Odysseys, launched from Waterloo Press at the Coast is Queer Literature Festival in Brighton 2022. The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (Cinnamon Press/Liquorice Fish 2018) was her previous collection. She was the co-founder of Queer Writing South and South Pole and co-edited Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014) with Anthony Luvera. Her poetry features in the British Library project Poetry Between Two Worlds and her drama Dementia Diaries toured nationally to sell-out audiences with Lewes Live Literature. She has been the lead artist in an ACE awarded cross arts project Snow Q, which toured with a live literature production in 2020 and has collaborated with filmmaker Wendy Pye to create 3 filmpoems :www.snowqproject.wordpress.com
Cedry z Walpole Park – The Cedars of Walpole Park a selection of her poems translated into Polish by Anna Błasiak, Wioletta Grzegorzewska and Paweł Gawroński was published in a bilingual collection by K.I.T, Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów in their series Faktoria (Poland 2015). Lidia Vianu has translated Old Knives, her selected poems, into Romanian, published in parallel texts by Integral Contemporary Literature Press in 2018.
Maria Jastrzębska co-translated Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar (Pighog Press 2011). Her translation of Justyna Bargielska’s selected poems The Great Plan B was published by Smokestack Press in November 2017.
Photo by Lizzie Barrington
About the blog
‘In May 2012 I was the animateur at Fabrica Gallery for their Brighton Festival show. That’s when I set up my first ever blog on the subject of crossing borders. Afterwards I thought it was time to have a blog of my own. Not that I’ve stopped thinking about borders – I can’t, I couldn’t if I tried.
Photo below by Andrew King
Maria Jastrzębska 