ABOUT ANCA VLASOPOLOS ...

Anca Vlasopolos has published a detective novel, a memoir, various short stories, over 200 poems, the poetry collection Penguins in a Warming World, and a nonfiction novel, The New Bedford Samurai. She was born in 1948 in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Dr. Vlasopolos was the 2012-13 recipient of the Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award, a presidential initiative created to support a faculty-artist-in-residence; showcase exceptional faculty talent in both traditional and non-traditional arts; and honor the memory of Murray E. Jackson, a valued member of the community and former member of the Wayne State University Board of Governors. Recipients of the award are given an academic year to engage solely in a creative project.

A SAMPLE FROM ANCA VLASOPOLOS ...

Adélie Penguins in Warmer Seas

imagine

trees not merely melting, dropping their seasonal
froth but getting shorter softer till in the morning one day

you look out of a now much lower misshapen window
and they're nothing but toadstools

edges of lawn now run greenly down sidewalk and street
street flows inexorably into the sewers

freeways clog under the advance of the slopes now seeking
their level like water

each day each step takes you longer in this plasticine
world left out through carelessness in noonday heat

and wherever you place your foot you are not certain
of firmness

soon you will have to adapt to all fours
then

as your hands too sink no matter how much you struggle
how little you move

you will know the calm panic unblinking stare
of giants no less than small rodents amphibians birds

ever so slowly swallowed
toward a crude digestion a dark refined return