A multi-year collaboration between English professor and poet Gail Wronsky and Los Angeles artist Gronk led to a 160-page book that surprises and delights readers. On a recent November evening, Wronsky and Gronk united at LMU’s Marymount Institute to celebrate the launch of “The Stranger You Are.” Wronsky had the idea for this project after seeing one of Gronk’s distinctive pieces on Instagram and writing a poem about it.
Created from a legacy received from Harry M. Daum ’38, the Daum Professorship is given annually to a tenured professor in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts with full rank who has exhibited a record of excellence in teaching and advising, scholarship or creative work, and service and leadership in their department, college, and university. Wronsky was awarded the 2019-20 Daum Professorship and used the funds and course remissions to focus on the project with Gronk, a queer Chicanx painter who has exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A. County Museum of Art, the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and internationally.
At the event, Wronsky and Gronk discussed the inception and creative, collaborative process of the project. In most cases, a crossover between words and images involves an illustration being created to pair with an already-finished written piece. However, in this case, every original piece was shown to Wronsky, who then let each image inspire her poetry.
Wronsky and Gronk also presented images and accompanying poems from their book. As Gronk’s artwork displayed on screen, Wronsky made it come to life with the sound and rhythm of her words. Wronsky and Gronk describe the collection as “coffee drawings” and “coffee poems,” and Gronk’s drawings are the perfect complement to Wronsky’s short and witty poems. The combination is careful and deliberate while appealing to the quotidian as well as the whimsical. Wronsky had to pause several times during her reading to wait for chuckles from a genuinely delighted audience to subside. One poem, titled “Don’t Do It,” had the audience erupt into laughter.
Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the U.S. and and Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics at the UC Berkeley, has this to say about Wronsky’s work: “Nerve, wit, dazzle, shape-shifting, a painful clearness; an urgent, generous, funny, dreadful intensity of imagination.”
