Jason Prokowiew
Cognoscenti contributor
Jason Prokowiew received the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History for his braided memoir "War Boys." His writing has appeared in Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series “The Audacity,” WBUR's Cognoscenti, on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage, and is forthcoming in The Guardian and North American Review. He runs his own law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.
Recently published
What we give — and receive — with the words, 'I'm sorry'
It’s Pride month, and Jason Prokowiew has been thinking about a high school bully — one who surprised him. It couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, and is...
My father survived starvation as a child. He never forgot what it meant to be hungry
Jason Prokowiew's father was 10 in 1941, when the Nazis that invaded Belarus murdered his mother. How to get food -- and how to survive without it -- became a...
Making peace with my nightmares
For decades, I avoided horror movies, writes Jason Prokowiew. Then, this past year, I watched 34 of them -- Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers showed me, my home is now...
My two dads: The one I had, and the one I deserve
Jason Prokowiew grew up with a father whose love felt complicated, but when he married his husband, he gained a father who shows care unconditionally. He writes, it didn’t take...
The Club Q shooting is not the queer story I wanted to tell
Clubs were where I could stop calculating how to stay alive and calculate how to ask a boy to dance, writes Jason Prokowiew.
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Florida is outlawing the one thing that helped gay kids like me
Florida's governor says parents, not teachers, should talk about sexual orientation, writes Jason Prokowiew. But who will the kids who grew up like me talk to?
500,000 Ukrainians have fled so far. What does it mean to lose your home, your life?
Jason Prokowiew's father was displaced from his home when Nazi Germany invaded Belarus in 1941. His father bore the trauma of those years for the rest of his life, as...