Gerard Wozek

Background

About Gerard Wozek

Spontaneous Me: A Travelogue with Gerard Wozek, offers weekly postings that examine ways to create heart-opening excursions through intuition and wonder. Subscribe for free through Substack https://gerardwozek.substack.com/. Wozek is the author of the poetry collection, A Little Wounded But On Fire (Tebot Bach, 2022). His debut book of poems, Dervish (Gival Press, won the Gival Press Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Postcards from Heartthrob Town (Southern Tier Editions, 2007), was selected by editor Michael Luongo for the “Out in the World” Haworth Press Travel Literature Series. A hand bound chapbook, The Changeling’s Exile (Deep Wood Press, 2010), with original engravings by Chad Pastotnik, is available in limited edition. Along with filmmaker Mary Russell, Wozek produced nearly a dozen poetry videos which have screened around the world and taken awards at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, the Video Bardo Poetry Video Festival in Buenos Aires, and the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver. His short film, Dance of the Electric Moccasins, took top honors at the 2005 Potenza Film Festival in Italy. Most recently, he collaborated on a video poem titled Not Death but Love which is a tribute to English Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Wozek is a former Professor of English and Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Robert Morris University Illinois. Based full-time in Chicago since 1994, Wozek designed and taught original experiential courses on various subjects, including Creative Writing, Comparative Contemporary Global Literature, and Film Studies. During his tenure, Wozek participated as a visiting professor in several study abroad ventures for the university, traveling to Vienna (Austria), Paris (France), Florence (Italy), and Tallin (Estonia). For more than a decade, he coordinated the university's Cultural Enrichment Program with a successful history of bringing in diverse cultural opportunities to the multi-campus institution, including partnerships with external arts organizations, guest speakers, off-campus field trips, and experiential learning projects. Wozek holds a B.A. in Communication from Loyola University of Chicago with a second major in Literature, an M.A. in Dramatic Theory from Northeastern Illinois University and an M.A. in Writing and Rhetoric from DePaul University. He also holds a Certificate in Secondary Education from Loyola University of Chicago.