PACIM: Afternoon with the Author – Anthony Bukoski

For forty-one years, Anthony Bukoski has written short stories about Polish Americans in northern Wisconsin. In the program, he will tell why he began doing this and how he has been inspired to continue. Though understanding that the stories may be flawed, he has been loyal to his subject, never straying from it. He will read very brief passages from a few of the stories and conclude by reading “A Sea Story” from The Thief of Words.

A discussion will follow, and Anthony is be pleased to sign books afterward.

Anthony Bukoski was born and raised in Superior, Wisconsin, the port city where his Polish immigrant grandparents settled. The author’s short story collections have twice won the Polish American Historical Association’s Creative Arts Award and once its Oskar Halecki Prize. The Sarmatian Review, under the aegis of the Polish Institute of Houston, also recognized Bukoski with its first Literary Award “for excellence in presenting the life of American Polish communities in the Midwest.”

From University of Wisconsin Press: “The Thief of Words is filled with desperate runaways, the unhappily married, and the displaced. These characters often long for happiness but struggle to explain—even to themselves—what that would entail. The lightly interconnected stories in this riveting collection are split between the Polish American communities of northern Wisconsin and Louisiana, where refugees from World War II were resettled. Exploring themes of dislocation and assimilation, love and loneliness, and generational conflict, Anthony Bukoski admirably paints portraits of people doing their best, despite the odds and their sometimes-thwarted attempts to follow the urgings of their better angels.”