Saturday, January 17, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Chopin Theatre
1543 W. Division St, Chicago, IL 60622

Free event, reserve a spot.

Poet and Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch will be in dialog with Prof. Joanna Trzeciak Huss about his recently published memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Standup Comedy, A Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025). Hirsch will be reading excerpts from the book, with a free-ranging discussion of Hirsch’s path to writing poetry and engaging with Polish poetry and Polish poets like Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski among others. 

The event will feature a premiere of a film from the Polish Poetry Unites series about Krakow-based poet Ryszard Krynicki, with Ewa Zadrzyńska, the series director in attendance.  (More about the series here.)

About the book: 

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet’s coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations.

In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.

Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry entitled How to Read A Poem And Fall In Love With Poetry published in 2014. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010) and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He has also published five prose books about poetry.  His latest book of essays, 100 Poems to Break your Heart was published in 2021.  He is president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City. Currently he is finishing a book of essays called The Heart of American Poetry. It will be published in April to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Library of America. The book consists of deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems. It rethinks the American tradition in poetry.  Ed Hirsch lives in New York City.

Joanna Trzeciak Huss is professor of translation studies at Kent State University. Her areas of specialization are 20th and 21st century Polish and Russian literature and translation theory. An associate editor of The Polish Review, she has edited special issues on Olga Tokarczuk, Stanisław Lem and Tadeusz Różewicz (forthcoming). Joanna’s translations have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Field, Zvezda, Boston Review, nonsite, Pleiades and The Hopkins Review, among others. Her books of poetry translation include Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska (W.W. Norton) and Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz (W.W. Norton). Awakening: Collected Poems of Zuzanna Ginczanka is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poetry translations were included in Best Literary Translations for 2024 and 2025 (Deep Vellum).

The event is sponsored by the Chopin Theatre, Knopf and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.