Yala Korwin, artist and poet, was born in Poland. She still remembers the spankings she used to get as a young child, for scribbling on walls of her parents' apartment. When she was six or seven, in a letter to her mother, she drew a woman holding a dog on a leash, and wrote: "Today I saw a lady with a dog." When in high school, she excelled in writing imaginative stories for her Polish Language classes. She went on writing and drawing all through her school years. The outbreak of World War II brought drastic changes to her life. Having survived a labor camp in the heart of Germany, and having no place to return to, she let the winds carry her to France, where she lived as a refugee for ten years. The urge to write never left her.
However, after years away from her native country, the Polish tongue didn't seem the right tool anymore. French, though greatly admired, remained a stranger.
A breakthrough came after she emigrated in 1956, with her husband and young children, to the United States. Enrolled in 1965 in college, she majored in French Literature with a minor in Art. She eventually earned her BA degree Magna Cum Laude, and a Masters degree in Library Science.
Korwin's first published work was a library tool, the two-volume Index to Two-Dimensional Art Works in Books, published in 1981 by Scarecrow Press. Her book, To Tell the Story - Poems of the Holocaust, was published in 1987 by the now defunct Holocaust Library. Her poetry has been published in numerous magazines, such as Midstream, Blue Unicorn, Orphic Lute, Piedmont Literary Review, and eleven.
Dawn, a watercolor
