In mid-2015 Philip C. Kolin, the editor of the Southern Quarterly and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Mississippi, published his seventh collection of poems Pilsen Snow: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Kolin’s poems emerge “from a personal and collective history” of Pilsen, a large Czech neighborhood on the near west side of Chicago which in the early part of the 20th Century “boasted having the second largest Czech population in the world.” In The Column, Kolin talks about the complexities of maintaining a Czech identity in America, evoking the people, places, and historical events, and even the language of his childhood. These Czech immigrants and their descendants had to “live in two worlds at once.”
To read the conversation with Philip C. Kolin, about Pilsen Snow, click here or on the book’s cover
JOANNA KUROWSKA 