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Maria Jastrzebska was born in Warsaw. She came to England as a child and grew up in London. She studied Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex and has done various jobs including teaching Self Defence. She lives in Brighton. She is author of : Postcards from Poland with visual artist Jola Scicinska (Working Press) Home from Home (Flarestack ) Syrena (Redbeck Press) I'll Be Back Before You Know It (Pighog Press) A new collection with Waterloo Press is forthcoming in 2009. She was co-editor of Forum Polek (The Polish Women’s Forum) — a bilingual anthology, Poetry South (2007) and Whoosh! (Queer Writing South/Pighog Press 2008). Early work such as Which Of Us Wears The Trousers were popularised by the feminist and lesbian presses and magazines of the 1980's and 1990's such as Spare Rib, Naming The Waves (Virago) Serious Pleasure (Sheba) and The Virago Book of Wicked Verse. The Good Immigrant was used by teachers in schools and colleges. Poems continued to appear in anthologies with a widening focus including The New British Poetry (Paladin), Words From The Women’s Café (Centerprise), As Girls Could Boast (Oscars Press) and her writing about illness appeared in anthologies such as Mustn’t Grumble (The Women’s Press) and in her own. More recently her work has appeared in Captured Voices (Indigo), Not For The Academy (Onlywomen Press), Parents (Enitharmon 2000), Images of Women (Arrowhead 2006) and Poetry South (2007). Her poetry was selected for 5x10 at Lewes Live Literature and for the international exhibition One Heart One World, which toured US, UK and Japan and for Best Lesbian and Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night's Press). Her poems have been published in French, Finnish, Japanese, Polish Romanian and Slovenian. She is a contributor to Telling Tales About Dementia (ed. Lucy Whitman, Jessica Kingsley Publishers Sept 2009) and to an Oxford Poets and Refugees Project anthology (Sept 2009, Heaventree Press). She has been published in journals such as Ambit, Envoi, Mslexia, The Rialto, Obsessed with Pipework, Poetry Wales with work most recently in Apokalipsa 2007 (Slovenia), Atlas, Brand, Caiete Internationale de Poezie (Romania), Chroma, Dans La Lune (France), Frogmore Papers, The Interpreters House, Kirjailija (Finland), Poetry International Web, Second Light, Shadowtrain, Smiths Knoll, Soundings Journal of Politics and Culture, Staple and Warsaw Tales 2009. As a poet she has always been concerned with borders and boundaries: between countries, cultures, languages, between social and sexual identities, health and illness. It is no accident that she has found herself irresistibly drawn to the prose poem, a form which questions its very definition. Some of her prose poems are featured on Poetry International Web. These form the basis of a play, Dementia Diaries, with original music by the composer Peter Copley, premier 2009, by Lewes Live Literature. She reads her work both internationally and locally, most recently at Cuisle in Limerick and Runokuu in Helsinki 2008 and also took part in the first British/Polish Manifestations Festival (2006). In 2006 she was invited to the Golden Boat International Poetry Translation Workshop in Slovenia, returning in 2008 as translator in residence. She founded SOUTH POLE a network of artists with Polish connection on the south coast and co directs Queer Writing South. www.south-pole.org.uk Comments: “Maria Jastrzebska ’s poems open out like adventures in a dual land that is both here and elsewhere. The elsewhere is both place and history: the one gives life to the other, the place to the history, the elsewhere to the here, the fable to the reality. The mixture is rich and clear as alcoholic spirits.” George Szirtes
Anne-Marie
Fyfe “The shadow and tenor of two tongues, cultures, histories, and sexualities are deftly embedded in her poetry - as is her use of forms both in her traditional couplets and prose poems she is willing to take risks, unafraid to display passion and at the same time rights controlled intelligent verse.” Sudeep
Senn “This is poetry with an original slant to it. We are used to Caribbean poets, Asian poets, Merseyside poets and so on - but Polish poets I’ve read only, so far, in translation. This is not-quite-English poetry...It’s written in English, but not quite expected English - and the unexpected in context of the expected is of the essence of real poetry.” U.A.
Fanthorpe “Here is the quiet cutting edge of honesty. Hers is a considered poetry, though inconsiderate enough when inconsideration is required.” Gillian
Allnutt “displays great strength, feeling and insight: her poems are lucid, deliberately plain-spoken, lyrical on occasion and invariably arresting.” Gerda Mayer
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