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Christina Pacosz, Polish-American Poet

Christina Pacosz was born in Detroit, Michigan October 12, 1946. She attended Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Grade School and Cass Technical High School, graduating in 1964. While in high school she received National Scholastic Writing Awards for her poetry. She attended Summer Arts Camp at Olivet College in Olivet Michigan and studied with W.D. Snodgrass. She was Feature Editor of the Cass Technician. her senior year in high school. During this time, the work of Polish-born, Jewish semantic linguist, Alfred Korzybski, further influenced her development as a working class writer.

She credits her mother, Sophia Kostrzewski Pacosz, for transcribing her early childhood oral stories, and her father, Walter Frank Pacosz, who told her stories about his childhood years in Missouri and Poland, as the primary influences in her life as a writer. Her parents are deceased.

In 1965, after high school, she studied poetry with Tuli Kupferberg at the first Free University, on the Lower East Side of New York City.

After graduating from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1970, she taught in Michigan and Oregon, working with mentally retarded and learning disabled children.

She was influenced by her encounters with Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove through the WomanSpirit magazine collective while still teaching in Oregon in the mid-1970's. Her articles, rituals, and poems appeared in several issues and she became involved in the collective efforts at publishing the magazine. She attended the last gathering held on U.S. Forest Service land in the Siskiyou National Forest in 1975.

From 1977-1978, she worked as Poet-in-the-Community for the Metropolitan Arts Commission of Portland, Oregon at the Children's Museum and in a locked institution for adolescent girls.

In the late 1970s, she drove a 29-foot motor home through five states in the upper Midwest for Plains Distribution of Fargo, North Dakota, promoting  small press literature and publishing. The Plains book bus was one of three operating in the U.S. at that time with a goal of distributing small press literature that might not otherwise be available to readers.

In 1981-1982, she was Artist-in-the-Schools for the Washington State Arts Commission.

From 1985-1992 she was a rostered artist with the South Carolina Arts Commission and conducted poetry residencies across the Palmetto state.

From 1986-1990 she was a North Carolina Visiting Artist writer-in-residence at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina and Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in Asheville, North Carolina.

Ms. Pacosz returned to her Polish roots with a trip to Poland in 1986. During that visit, she studied Polish-Jewish relations at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and visited relatives, most of whom she had never met. This Is Not A Place to Sing was a poetry collection borne of that journey to Poland. John Guzlowski chose to feature a review of this book by Maria Mazziotti Gillan on his blog about "Writing the Polish Diaspora." Later, while living on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she researched Slavic mythology.

She returned to public school teaching in 1991-1992, working with learning disabled children in Delta Junction, Alaska.

Honors and awards include scholarships for poetry workshops at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington in the late 1970's where Ms. Pacosz studied with Madeline DeFrees, Olga Broumas, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood and others; a one-month writing fellowship in 1984 at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming; chosen as one of twenty finalists in the Seattle Arts Commission Poetry Competition.

She is a member of the West Side Detroit Polish-American Historical Society, a group that focuses on the history and culture of the west side neighborhoods in Detroit. Her personal journals and all published work have been accepted into the Bentley Collection at the University of Michigan. Her published work includes: Shimmy Up To This Fine Mud, Poets Warehouse, (Portland OR) 1975; Notes From the Red Zone, Seal Press, (Seattle) 1983; Some Winded, Wild Beast, Black and Red (Detroit) 1985; This is Not a Place to Sing, West End (Albuquerque) 1987; One River, a Pudding House Publications chapbook, 2001; Christina Pacosz, Greatest Hits, a Pudding House Publications Chapbook, 2002.

Notes From the Red Zone won the ReBound Award and was re-issued as a new chapbook from Seven Kitchens Press in 2009.

Her poetry has been featured in numerous online reviews and hard copy journals, including Kritya, Qaartsiluni, and The Hypertexts, all journals featuring women writers from around the world. Through her association with the Missouri Center for the Book, she has been invited to be a featured reader at Montserrat three years in a row.

Ms. Pacosz has been married to Larry Rollings since 1987. She lives in Kansas City and has taught at-risk youth both sides of the state line.

[|Cass Technical High School] [] [] [] [|Wayne State University] [] [|Wiki page for Jagiellonian University in Poland] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [North Carolina Arts Commission] [] [Washington State Arts Commission] [] [Depth of Field] [] [] [http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome] [Grady Harp's review] [Dave Bonta's podcast about Ms. Pacosz] [U. Michigan link to Pacosz collection of work] [Link to Pacosz essay]