Anthony Bukoski

Anthony Bukoski
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Born	Anthony Vincent Bukoski (1945-10-18) October 18, 1945 Superior, Wisconsin, United States
Nationality	American
Known for	Short stories
Awards	- Anne Powers Book Length Fiction Award (now the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award) four times from the Council for Wisconsin Writers - The Polish American Historical Association Creative Arts Award (twice) and once its Oskar Halecki Prize - The Christopher Isherwood Foundation R. V. Cassill Fellow in Fiction

Anthony Bukoski (born October 18, 1945) is a Polish-American writer living in Superior, Wisconsin. He has published seven collections of short stories and won numerous awards for his writing. His story Time Between Trains was read at New York's Symphony Space as part of the Selected Shorts program. Bukoski and Stuart Dybek are considered among the leading chroniclers of the Polish-American experience. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Biography

Bukoski's life is rooted in the working-class community of Polish-Americans in Superior, Wisconsin. He was born at St. Francis Hospital in Superior's East End neighborhood. His mother, the former Genevieve Barbara Fronckiewicz, was a homemaker. His father, Joseph Anthony Bukoski, sailed on the Great Lakes, at first working belowdecks as a coal passer shoveling coal into boilers on "Black Gangs." During World War II, he served as a first assistant engineer on merchant marine ships in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf. Later, Bukoski's father worked in the King Midas flour mill in Superior.

Bukoski attended St. Adalbert's grade school and church, where he was an altar boy. In 1963 he graduated from Superior Cathedral High School. A year later, he joined the Marines. He served a tour in Da Nang, South Vietnam. He had achieved the rank of corporal when he was discharged in 1967. Bukoski then returned to Superior and enrolled at Wisconsin State University-Superior, now University of Wisconsin-Superior, graduating in 1970.

Bukoski went on to earn an A.M. degree at Brown University. He attended the University of Iowa, earning an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied with John Irving, and a Ph.D. in literature in 1984. After teaching at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Bukoski returned to his hometown to take a position at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

For most of his life, Bukoski has lived in Superior. The city and its working-class Polish-American community with its deep ties to the Catholic Church are the subjects of many of his short stories. Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Strout, Eudora Welty, and Sherwood Anderson are among the regional writers Bukoski has been compared to.

Bukoski is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He has reviewed fifty-nine books for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has also written reviews for Books in Canada, Studies in the Novel, Canadian Literature, and other publications.

Critical reception

In her introduction to an interview with Bukoski, Rachel Swearingen describes his writing as, "Meticulous, thoughtful, and unflinching...." Thomas J. Napierkowski notes that Bukoski portrays Superior's Polish-American community "...with an uncommon command of language, dialogue, characterization, and setting which has won for him growing national and international interest and acclaim."

In a profile of Bukoski, Nick Hayes notes, "Bukoski has done for Superior’s East End what Ray Carver did for the down and out of the Puget Sound or Pete Hamill did when annexing New York for the Irish. He has brought back to life Superior’s Polish Americans and the blue-collar community from its boom days in the post-WWII era to its decline and near disappearance in recent times." He goes on, "Tone and pitch are perfect in Bukoski’s writing. His voice is heartfelt, but never mawkish, and through his work Superior’s East End’s past is not forgotten."

According to Katherine A. Powers, Bukoski's stories "...excel in their palpable sense of place and of their characters' lot in life. They are painfully evocative of a once thriving region, their settings the gritty, uncelebrated places where life runs raw...."

Bukoski has won the Anne Powers Book Length Fiction Award (now the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award) four times from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. The Polish American Historical Association has twice presented Bukoski its Creative Arts Award and once its Oskar Halecki Prize. In 2002 he was named the R. V. Cassill Fellow in Fiction by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, and he was awarded the first Literary Prize given by Polish Institute of Houston, "For Excellence in presenting the life of American Polish communities in the Midwest."

Work

Bukoski has published more than eighty stories in roughly as many journals. The stories have appeared in New Letters, The Cimarron Review, Image, Quarterly West, The Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, New Orleans Review (twice), Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, Mid-American Review, Arcana (Poland), Akcent (Poland), and other magazines.

Story collections

• Twelve Below Zero – New Rivers Press, 1986
• Children of Strangers: Stories – Southern Methodist University Press, 1993
• Polonaise: Stories – Southern Methodist University Press, 1999
• Time Between Trains: Stories – Southern Methodist University Press, 2003
• North of the Port: Stories – Southern Methodist University Press, 2008
• Twelve Below Zero: New and Expanded Edition – Holy Cow! Press, 2008
• Head of the Lakes: Selected Short Stories – Nodin Press, 2018
• The Blondes of Wisconsin – University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

As of 2023, Bukoski is completing a new collection of stories.

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