Peter Hargitai

Background

About Peter Hargitai

I have been privileged to serve as the Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida (pop. 12,586) for 4 years. In that time I published some highly gifted and diverse poets in an anthology titled GATEWAY: Gulfport Poets. As a poet I published two slim volumes of poems, OPENING AT TOWN SHORES (Yellow Jacket Press, 2019) and FEATHERED GLORY (Cyberwit.net, 2020). Currently I am working on writing comédie noire thrillers. My first in the genre is due to come out by February of 2022 from Cyberwit.net in Allahabad, India. My historical fiction novel DAUGHTER OF THE REVOLUTION (2006) starring a schoolgirl warrior made into an award-wining documentary by Hungarian director Tunde Talas. I am published in both English and Hungarian. I am the 1988 winner of the Harold Morton Landon translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for my translation of Attila József in PERCHED ON NOTHING'S BRANCH and listed in Harold Bloom's THE WESTERN CANON: THE BOOKS AND SCHOOL FOR THE AGES. I support freedom of expression in all human endeavor, including the right to speak, write and publish in one's mother tongue. I am a follower of my dictum "radical inclusion" of all peoples no matter who they are and what they believe in. I support democracy and equal rights for all the children of the universe. But I'm not ready to buy the world a Coke. I support our environment and human compassion when it comes to refugees from war-torn countries. As a child witness to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, I saw first-hand man’s inhumanity to man. It was poetry and the miraculous power of language and a sense for the comic that continue to nourish me. I am not looking to work for anybody and guard my solitude and independence fiercely so I can "exercise my craft and sullen art in the still night."