Krzysztof Czyżewski

POET & PRACTITIONER OF IDEAS

Poland

Winter 2026

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Contact Info

Instagram: krzysztof-czyżewski

BIOGRAPHY

Krzysztof Czyżewski was born in Warsaw and graduated in Polish philology from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. In 1978-1983 he worked as an actor at the Gardzienice Theater. During martial law in Poland, he became co-founder and editor of the underground magazine Czas Kultury. In 1990, he was one of the initiators of the Borderland Foundation and became its president. In 1991, he moved to Sejny, where he initiated the establishment of the Borderland Center of Arts, Cultures, Nations and became its director. He runs the international flying literary café Café Europa, which he initiated during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and whose meetings, combining poetry readings with music and discussion, have been held all over the world. He is Director of Borderland’s theatrical works, including Three Women: Metamorphoses of the Medea Myth in Ovid and Picasso, and Mystery of the Bridge. He was artistic director of the European Capital of Culture Lublin project and ECC Wrocław 2016. Krzysztof lives with his wife and two children in Krasnogruda, a village on the border with Lithuania, where he runs the International Center for Dialogue with the Borderland team in a manor house that once belonged to the family of poet Czesław Miłosz.

PROJECT

In Fes, Krzysztof Czyżewski will be working on an epic poem of passage titled The Invisible Bridge. Understood as a more capacious form, the poetic tale will juxtapose different literary types. “Passage" refers to the liminal realm, hospitable to transgression. The poem will be composed as a palimpsest of different voices and poetics. It will be written in the form of a testament/manifesto, into which fragments of a philosophical-mystical treatise and excerpts from diary will be incorporated. The right context for his work will be the modern world in miniature. Crisis of multiculturalism. Shadows of genocide, the drama of refugees from the South, the new fascism. The Invisible Bridge once existed here. The secret of its construction has been lost. Deprived of it, the place and the community are experiencing decay. A drama of transition will play out between the Native, the Other and the Stranger. They will have to grapple with the boundaries of their identities, an increasingly common connective tissue disease, and a longing for love that transcends the horizon of their life experience.