Literary Agency

Literary Agency
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Richard Krawiec Makes Words Do Some Good in this Old World

Photo by Alex Boerner
I loved reading, and wanted to write something that moved me as much as I was moved by the stories I read. But I wanted to write about the people I didn't find in books. Yet.” Richard Kwaiwec, publisher of Jacar Press and American novelist

Richard Krawiec believes in words- their magic, music, majesty, industry and power. He believes in people even more but he uses these words frequently. I mean we all speak and write everyday but he is dialed into another dimension where words are formed by emotional intentions, visionary projections, a bright light dripping with humanity and metaphysical possibilities. He sees where words have the possibility of elevating the human condition. Words are literal symbols and sonar material, magical bits of the universe that can alchemically form moments of good in this old world. If this were the 1200’s maybe Richard Krawiec would be a speaker of spells, a good wizard with clear water blue eyes and an electric cap of sheep’s wool (strands of hair in constant disarray channeling signals of hope and faith from the universe into a temple for that good distribution).

I hope I have not lost you but that's just a lotta mumbo jumbo to say Richard Krawiec is very selective in the words he chooses to use. He understands their power and that is not to say he uses them for power because he does not. There is a difference. Richard Krawiec is an old romantic soul who does real magic. He harnesses good and decent possibilities. Words are his medium. Prose spells in most circumstances but he will conjure poetry and playwright matter just as well.

“Richard Krawiec believes that when you have a voice you should use it to help those who do not. He believes not only in the power of words to harness and focus a life, but in the necessity to go further — to take personal or professional risks to speak out against injustice. He is a man who walks the walk, for whom what he says is what he will do, both on paper and in deed. His advocacy and integrity run through the marrow of his bones but it doesn’t come without cost” Melissa Hassard, partner and managing editor of Sable Books
From left to right, Resisting Arrest (anthology edited by Tony Medina), Feeding the Light by Jaki Shelton Green, Poet Laureate of the People, and Duet by Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux - Jacar Press founded by Richard Krawiec books of poetry

From left to right, Resisting Arrest (anthology edited by Tony Medina), Feeding the Light by Jaki Shelton Green, Poet Laureate of the People, and Duet by Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux - Jacar Press founded by Richard Krawiec books of poetry

Jacar Press books of poetry

He has sheared off the long wooly beard of his youth that has come to typify wizards. But I believe it is an optical illusion, a slight of effect. Look in his cool eyes. The effect of his words, his magic, are no less clear or revelatory. He writes and speaks (in a Boston brewed accent) sentences that make sense. They are balanced and resonate with a profound humanity and a startling sense of justice and imagination too. He writes them all the time on his Facebook post or speaks them to his students at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He writes them in books of poetry and in certain frequencies is renowned for his prose and fiction. But he lives them too. His words breath and will easily infect others with their earnest vibrancy. He walks the talk at the podium with frequent poetry readings, volunteers in women’s detention homes and brings his keen sense of literary justice and healing to homeless shelters in Boston and North Carolina communities where he teaches the art form and craft of writing.

"Don't we all want to feel like we have a voice? That what we have to say matters? Aren't all our discussions and posts and celebrations and rantings about politics and refugees and the murders of innocents at the hands of police - aren't we all just basically saying: I was here. This is what I saw or thought or felt. This is my witness of what happens on this planet - to others, or myself, and here are my feelings about that. Isn't it all a matter of putting our voices out into the world? Hoping our notes can join, if not be heard through, the cacophony?” - Richard Krawiec, wordsmith humanitarian

He celebrates in them with his activist publishing press, Jacar Press. He speaks at elementary schools to students and gets them jazzed about the power of words, the possibilities within poetry. Richard Krawiec is an American institution, singular in his magic, unrelenting in the demands he makes of himself to marshal good and host it in this old world.

NC Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson was inducted into the Hall of Fame with Jaki Shelton Green, Shelby Dean Stephenson and Richard Krawiec.

NC Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson was inducted into the Hall of Fame with Jaki Shelton Green, Shelby Dean Stephenson and Richard Krawiec.

 Women Who Loved Me Despite

Women Who Loved Me Despite

"Women Who Loved Me Despite" book of poetry by Richard Krawiec

“Privilege, appropriation, prejudice, discrimination, exclusion, hate speech, violence - these are so many ways to silence other voices, aren't they? To say, What you have to say doesn't count. Doesn't matter.” Richard Krawiec, wordsmith humanitarian

He's smart. Clever too. And good. Richard Krawiec is a good man when good men are not the modus operendi. So, I guess it's part of his character (not that being 'good' is a style but with all the reality television age self-promotion and social media production these days, it is important to make the distinction). 'Goodness' per se is not an quality oozing with sexiness and branding and marketing possibilities. But it is essential to the American character.

Time Sharing is a 1986 novel by Richard Krawiec, published by Viking Press.

Time Sharing is a 1986 novel by Richard Krawiec, published by Viking Press.

Well, imagine getting a clear eyed wizard with lightening for hair, a wordsmith marvel with a Bostonian accent, to sit and talk with you a few. It’s not really all that hard. You just open your heart, speak your mind and keep it real. The wizard will retort in the flow - at least that’s what I found with our exchange:

You've been at the literary game for awhile, publishing 'Time Sharing' in 1986 receiving critical attention from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. You've published sports books for children (Yao Ming and Sarah Hughes), books of poetry ("Breakdown" and "She Hands Me the Razor"). You have worked with women in prison poetry programs, homeless shelters and and housing projects. Currently you work with children in elementary school, infecting them with your passion. Basically, you are a lifelong "literary advocate". What exactly animates you in your passion for literature, poetry and all things related to the word? Where does your passion stem from?

I think my passion for writing, and activism, developed from two diverse sources growing up. My passion for reading as a child, and my awareness that I didn't quite fit in anywhere, and other people didn't either. For the reading, I was drawn to books that exhibited both a dogged persistence - the Little Engine that Could. But also work that seemed to speak of injustice. I remember crying my eyes out at The Pokey Little Puppy, who was denied dessert because he was curious and wanted to explore the world. The message was supposed to be Obey those in authority, but what I got out of it was that he was punished merely for being curious, and that seemed wrong. I loved that he dug his way out of his fenced-in enclosure and roamed. And hated that the 'powers-that-be' punished him for it, tried to break his will to make him compliant.

I grew up on Battle Street, in Brockton, where there was literally a different ethnic family in each house - Russian, Lithuanian, French, Dutch, Italian, Irish-Polish. It was a diverse neighborhood that was oddly coherent in the sense that everyone was struggling - not upwardly mobile so much as struggling not to fall back into poverty it seemed. Working two jobs, going to night school. Most of the kids were first or second generation Americans, if I remember correctly.

We were separated from the Richmond Street projects by a small wooded area, and I spent a lot of my childhood visiting friends in the projects. The projects were a different world in many ways than my street. It was the first place where I saw two men, two fathers, have a fist fight in the street in broad daylight; where I witnessed one man beaten to a bloody pulp and begging, crying for mercy, while his son ran home in shame. Where I witnessed members of a motorcycle gang pull up to a woman's apartment and the nervous, reluctant way she let them swagger in. Ethnicity didn't matter as much in the projects, but poverty, and race, did. I was less aware of the background nationalities of my friends. More aware the projects seemed to break into two camps. African-American and white. The groups seemed to despise each other.

It was a different environment in other ways, too, because it was a world where the nuclear family wasn't the common model. A number of my friends were raised by single mothers. Kids were alone a lot to fend for themselves. We did what kids, being curious, often did. We explored the apartments, checked closets and drawers. One of the most stunning moments of my life was when my best friend, M. found, in his mother's bureau, a large hardcover book of photographs featuring a white women having explicit sex with an African-American man.

First, it was stunning that a mother might be interested in photos of people having sex. In those days, the idea a mother might enjoy sex was unheard of. Second, M. didn't know how to receive the issue of race. Back in the early 60s, you did not see dating between whites and Blacks. I remember he rushed me out of the apartment to be alone so he could figure it out.

The stories of the people I knew, my stories, I soon realized were not covered in the literature we received at school. In those school books, all the families were white, middle class, two parents and two kids. No one had an ethnic or racial identity. No one was poor, or struggling to make a living. Our stories were not being told. That's what I set out to do. I loved reading, and wanted to write something that moved me as much as I was moved by the stories I read. But I wanted to write about the people I didn't find in books. Yet.

By Junior High (middle school) I was reading Dickens and I began to see that it was possible to write about those who were left out by society. Those whose voices we denied. Those who went unheard. The poor, the miserable - the Vulnerables to use the title for my forthcoming novel from the Paris publisher Editions Tusitala. I like that. Because ultimately it is about those who are vulnerable.

(Below, some of Richard Krawiec’s work with fellow poet and wordsmith Shadab Zeest Hashmi)

“The lens he lives and writes through is love — agape — love for the world and love for all of us on it. His mind is quick, diamond-sharp, well-honed, and he continuously asks the questions to understand both the present moment and the larger scope. Some people are born to write. We should read them and not only listen but listen deeply. Richard is just such a person.” Melissa Hassard, partner and managing editor of Sable Books

Often times a "literary agent" is described as a business go between who brokers a relationship between a writer and a publisher for a percentage of the deal. But a literal survey of the two words conjoined suggests more. It suggests a broader anagogic meaning without the business connotation though not excluding it. "Literary agent" suggests one that services literary culture without concern for one’s own gain. It suggests the pragmatism of love where an individual serves a culture of poets, authors, words, readings, libraries, book stores and books. “Literary agent” suggest an enthusiast in the higher art of words and their affects.

Richard Krawiec promotes literary happenings with a zeal that is not concerned with what is in trend. He promotes it like it is gangster (or wizard) cool because it is. In a time when the President of the United States forms international and national headlines with 140 character Tweets, Richard Krawiec jones over perfect sentences (complex, simple or fragmented) good books and the flow of poems in a book of poetry. He gets excited about 8th graders and brown skinned high schoolers jonesing over the possibility of poetry. He is absolutely elated when he sees the effects of words and their possibility taking root in others - when he sees the voiceless gaining power through their own. Words, that is.

Richard Krawiec likes nature, Buddhism and peace. He speaks with candor and a dull warm light emanates from his being at all times. It is small but bright and powerful, a window into a vast soul, a place of uncommon humanity and decency. He appreciates a full moon, will watch a hawk soar and master time so that he may watch flowers bloom. He wants to see literature win but not for its own sake. If he was into ego he might be considered a literary giant. But there are no airs. There is not an iota, not an ounce of that sort of banality within Richard Krawiec's person. He's clean that way. He is a literary agent, authentic. His work is art agency of the American literary flow.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot