Jason Prokowiew w/ Bill Hollands, WAR BOYS: A FATHER AND SON MEMOIR

Jason Prokowiew visits the store for his debut War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir, an extraordinary exploration of a family experiencing intergenerational trauma: an adult son seeking to understand his terrifying and abusive father, interwoven with a biography of his father, who experienced unimaginable horrors as a child during World War II. He is joined by poet Bill Hollands, author of Mangrove.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.

In the vein of Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn and The Boys in the Light by Nina Willner, War Boys by Jason Prokowiew explores the inter-generational trauma that began with his father being orphaned in WW II and being adopted by a Nazi commander, and how, through a series of conversations, they finally achieve a close and loving father/son relationship as adults.

War Boys is an extraordinary exploration of a family experiencing intergenerational trauma: an adult son seeking to understand his terrifying and abusive father, interwoven with a biography of his father, who experienced unimaginable horrors as a child during World War II.

As a child, Jason Prokowiew lived in fear of his father, an abusive alcoholic. Lonely and full of shame and guilt, Prokowiew recounts a lonely childhood, colored by struggles with weight, self-image, and his emerging identity as a gay man.

Impelled to confront the trauma of his childhood, Prokowiew documents the stories of his father's own trauma that began when Nazis murdered his family at the start of the war. In War Boys, Prokowiew retraces his father's harrowing journey to understand how he survived the war and why he became the terrifying father Jason knew. In an era where generational estrangement is common, War Boys inspires with its account of this father and son, both battle-scarred survivors, and how they heal their relationship through the power of claiming and telling their own stories - and listening to one another.

Jason Prokowiew is a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar and won the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father's adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University, where he was mentored by Bev Lowry. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay's Emerging Writer Series, "The Audacity," WBUR's Cognoscenti, Brevity, Business Insider, and on PBS/WORLD Channel's Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, "Sing," has over 2.6 million views on Facebook and is the most viewed in the show's history. His essay "The Demulcent of Shame," originally published by Roxane Gay, won the 2023 Lascaux Prize for Creative Nonfiction and Honorable Mention in the 2024 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest. He's received additional support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. A recovering disability attorney, he lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ. Find out more at www.jasonprokowiew.com

Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. He has returned to poetry after a long hiatus, and his recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown and Rattlecast podcasts. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest and was a 2025 Jack Straw Writing Fellow. His debut collection Mangrove, a finalist for the Last Syllable Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry, and the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, is out now.