Philip Boehm has translated more than 30 books and plays by Polish and German writers such as Hanna Krall, Herta Müller, and Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. He also works as a theater director and playwright: writings for the stage include Mixtitlan, The Good Ship St. Louis, and Return of the Bedbug.
As the founding artistic director of Upstream Theater in St. Louis, he has produced dozens of U.S. premiers of plays from around the world, many in translation.
During his MacDowell residency, he will be translating I’ll be Back before Dark, by the late Jerzy Szperkowicz, a highly acclaimed work of Polish reportage in which the author returns to places of his childhood—now western Belarus—hoping to discover exactly what happened to his mother when she set out one October day in 1943 and never returned.