About Agata:
Agata was born and raised in Poland. She came to the U.S. as an MFA student and graduated with a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina. Her publications include an award-winning memoir, The Hunger Book, scholarly books on 20th-century literature, as well as essays and short stories in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Contrary Magazine, River Poets Journal, Entropy, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, and Wabash Magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Gournay Prize and the 2019 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Prize. The Hunger Book has been shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Agata lives in Indiana, where she teaches at Wabash College and volunteers as a Court Appointed Special Advocate. She is the founder of Immigrant Allies.
Here's how to pronounce her name: Agata Izabela Brewer
Agata Szczeszak-Brewer
Professor, Department of English
John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric
Wabash College
PUBLICATIONS:
*under Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (scholarship) and Agata Izabela Brewer (creative writing)
Books:
Sex and Nation in Transatlantic Literatures. Bloomsbury Academic. Forthcoming 2025.
The Hunger Book: A Memoir in Essays. Mad Creek Books. (imprint of The Ohio State University Press),
Fall 2023.
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Winner of the 2022 Gournay Prize
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Shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize in Writing, 2024
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Shortlisted for the Indiana Author Award, 2024
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Nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, 2023
Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad, ed. University of South Carolina Press. July 2015.
Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce. University Press of Florida. James Joyce Series. 2010.
Hardcover. Reissued in paperback, 2017.
Journal Editing:
Geographies of Comparison: Ireland-South Africa. Co-edited with Cóilín Parsons. Special Issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Robert J.C. Young. 23.1 (2021).
Fiction:
“A Comma.” River Poets Journal. Vol 6, No. 3. Autumn/Winter 2012.
“When I Say Yes.” Contrary Magazine. Autumn 2021.
Creative Nonfiction:
“Leaving Lviv.” Guernica. March 9, 2022.
“The (Face)Book of Academic Motherhood: Online communities respond to the traumatic and the mundane,” with Laura Quaynor, in Academic Mothers Building Online Communities: It Takes a Village, ed. Sarah Trocchio, Lisa K. Hanasono, Jessica Jorgenson Borchert, Rachael Dwyer, Jeanette Yih Ha. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
“Woven: Why I Didn’t Report.” Entropy. March 24, 2021.
“Birds.” Black Warrior Review. 46.2. Winter/Spring 2020. Winner of the 2019 BWR Nonfiction Prize.
“Mushrooms.” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities. Web. Summer 2018.
“What You Won’t See in a Photograph.” Wabash Magazine. Fall 2016.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
“LÉ James Joyce’s Exiles.” James Joyce Quarterly. 60.3/2023.
“Stage Irish and Boorish Boers: Transatlantic Racial Politics in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African
Farm,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 23.1 (2021).
“White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy’s Small Island.” Race and Narrative. Ed. Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt. Routledge. 2020.
“Conrad’s Decoud and Joyce’s Dedalus: The Tragic Farce of Nationalism.” Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives. Vol 23. Columbia University Press. 2014.
“Joyce’s Vagina Dentata: Irish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 34:2 (2013).
“Teleology without a Telos?: Constitutive Absence in James Joyce’s Pilgrimage” in Displacing the Center:
Pilgrimage in a Mobile World, Simon Coleman and John Eade (eds.), Mobilities Vol. 2, No. 3 (November
2007): 347-362.
“Conrad, Joyce, and the Development of Urban Psychological Cartographies.” Beyond the Roots: The Evolution of Conrad’s Ideology and Art. Wiesław Krajka (ed.). Columbia University Press, 2005.
“Caribbean Hybridity and the Ironies of History: An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Yemassee Vol. XI, No. 1 (Fall 2003): 1-10.
Non-Peer Reviewed Publications:
“Stage Irish and Chinese Stage in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Asian Studies and the Liberal Arts. Wabash College and DePauw University. 2016.
Public Humanities:
“Itinerant Humanities.” Inside Higher Ed. Web. January 2015.
Invited Podcasts and Selected Media Interviews:
“The Door to Freedom,” Jennifer Griffith. https://www.byjennifergriffith.com/the-door-to-freedom-agata-izabela-brewer/
Hippocampus Magazine. Dec 11, 2023. https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2023/12/interview-agata-izabela-brewer-author-of-the-hunger-book-a-memoir-from-communist-poland/
Inscape Journal. Nov 1, 2023. https://inscape.byu.edu/2024/04/01/interview-with-agata-izabela-brewer/
“Of Notoriety.” TV interview with Phil Potempa. WJOB. March 7, 2024. https://www.jedtv.com/of-notoriety.html
Craft. Mar 27, 2024. https://www.craftliterary.com/2024/03/27/interview-agata-izabela-brewer/
Selected Book Reviews:
Review of Conrad’s Trojan Horses: Imperialism, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial Aesthetic by Tom Henthorne.
Joseph Conrad Today, fall 2011.
Review of Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses ed. by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty, James Joyce Literary
Supplement, April 2011.
Review of The Modernist Novel and the Decline of the Empire by John Marx. James Joyce Literary
Supplement, April 2008.
Review of Dubliners’ Dozen: The Games Narrators Play. James Joyce Literary Supplement, 2007.
Review of Joseph Conrad: East European, Polish and Worldwide. Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, 4/2003,
Warsaw: PAN, 2004.