John Guzlowski (born 1948) is a Polish-American author. Personal life John Guzlowski was born the son of parents who met in a Nazi slave labor camp in Germany. His mother Tekla Hanczarek came from a small community west of Lwów in what was then Poland (modern Lviv, Ukraine) where her father was a forest warden. John's father, Jan, was born in a farming community north of Poznań. John was born Zbigniew Guzlowski in a Displaced Persons camp in Vienenburg, Germany in 1948, and changed his name to John when he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1968. His parents, his sister Donna, and he came to the US as DPs in 1951. After working on farms in western New York State to pay off their passage to America, they eventually settled in Chicago in the city's old Polish Downtown in the vicinity of St. Fidelis Parish in Humboldt Park. After attending the University of Illinois in Chicago, he completed a Ph.D. in American literature at Purdue University. He taught literature and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and retired in 2005. He lives in Lynchburg, VA, with his wife Linda Calendrillo and his daughter Lillian Guzlowski and granddaughter Luciana Guzlowski. Literature Growing up in Chicago's immigrant and displaced person neighborhoods, Guzlowski regularly interacted “with Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish Cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Soviets.” Guzlowski would later write that his written work was composed to "try to remember them and their voices." Guzlowski earned his Ph.D. in English at Purdue University in 1980, and is now retired from Eastern Illinois University, where he taught contemporary American literature and poetry writing. His poems deal with his parents' experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. He has authored three books about his parents' experiences: Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press). These books continue the story of his parents that began in his chapbook Language of Mules which was republished as Język Mułów i Inne Wiersze, a Polish-English edition of this chapbook and other poems, and published by Biblioteka Śląska in Katowice, Poland. His poem "What My Father Believed" was read by Garrison Keillor on the Writers Almanac program. Other poems have appeared