S6E10 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

This is the third in a series of episodes presenting contemporary Polish poets and their work. If you haven’t seen them yet, watch the first episode in this series with Krystyna Dąbrowska and Tomasz Różycki from season 4, and the second episode with Julia Fiedorczuk and Tadeusz Dąbrowski from earlier this year.

In this episode, Kornhauser and Rolando offer their perspectives on the contemporary poetry scene in Poland, after the “age of giants” that included Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and Różewicz. Kornhauser presents a catalogue of major recent trends and the leading poets representing each of those currents. Rolando talks about the relationship between her graphic works and her poetry, and her particular emphasis on the ambiguous and obscure, which leaves much space for the reader or viewer to find themselves in the work.

Jakub Kornhauser and Bianka Rolando in English translation:

Jakub Kornhauser. Hemorrhages and Squirrels. Tr. Piotr Florczyk. New Orleans: Diálogos, 2025.  

Bianka Rolando. Inselbergs. Tr. Benjamin Paloff. Los Angeles: X Artists Books, forthcoming 2026.

Jakub Kornhauser (b. 1984) is a Polish poet, essayist, translator, editor, literary scholar, co-founder and employee of the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He has published eight volumes of prose poetry (he received the Wisława Szymborska Award 2016 for Drożdżownia (The Yeast Factory), several collections of essays and monographs on the European avant-gardes, as well as books translated from French, Romanian, and Serbian (including works by Henri Michaux, Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum and Miroljub Todorović). His collection of bicycle prose entitled Premie górskie najwyższej kategorii (Mountain climbs hors categorie, 2020) earned him the Znaczenia Award and Gdynia Literary Prize nomination. He lives in Kraków, Poland. 

Bianka Rolando (b. 1979 in Warsaw) is a poet, an artist, writer, and professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She also runs a drawing studio at the Faculty of Pedagogy and Artistry of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Kalisz. Her books of poetry include Apse (2024), Abrash (2022), Inselbergs (2020), Stelle (2018), Pascha (2016), Wetlands (2015), Flatbreads (2012), Larch Crowns (2010), White Book (2009), and An Italian Phrasebook (2007). Her artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Polish Institute in Rome, at the Kunsthalle Bratislava, or Yuan Museum in Beijing.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Produce