"20/20" is born out of the same brutal Dadaist context of war and dehumanisation. As a voice of dislocated identity in exile, this collaboration between Mario Susko and Renée Sigel, is a shared, symbolic dissident
scream, in the face of ruthless institutionalised personal violation. A protest against barbarism, "20/20" is a deeply personal, poetic conversation about the resilience of love, memory and dignity in face of erasure that is the absurd ideology of war. It is a timely reflection of the profound contemporary story of war and exile in witness to the current ruthless assault in Syria, told by two poets, each a survivor of very different war zones.
The Poets
Mario Susko is an internationally acclaimed poet and author. A witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia, received his M.A. and Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook in the 1970s and moved back to the US in 1993. A three-time Fulbright scholar, he has taught at the University of Sarajevo, but has lived more than half of the past 36 years in the US. He is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. His works include translations of James Baldwin, Saul Bellow and
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Croatian. He has won innumerable prizes amongst which are the prestigious Nuove Lettere Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Letteratura, and the Council of Europe Award. He is the 2015 recipient of Croatia’s Goran Wreath, Croatia's highest cultural accolade for his contribution to literature and poetry.
Renée Sigel is a poet, essayist and small independent publisher. Her work has been featured and published across a variety of artistic disciplines. Her poetry was first published by the English Academy of South Africa. Forced to leave South Africa under severe political pressure, she moved to Switzerland. She collaborated with international names and institutions, among them award-winning film documentaries directed by Werner Schweizer, Remake of the Weekend with Pippilotti Rist and commissions by The Zurich Opera House and The Zurich Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Howard Griffiths. She has two previous poetry collections. She participated in the first UN-hosted conference on human trafficking in Vienna and has been a TED Fellow nominee. In 2015, two of her poems were featured at the 25th Anniversary Exhibition of the Kunsthaus, Zug.