Hedwig Gorski  Hedwig Gorski (born July 18, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "American futurism". The term "performance poetry", a precursor to slam poetry, is attributed to her. It originated in press releases for experimental spoken word and conceptual theater Gorski created during 1979. She is a first-generation Polish American academic scholar and accomplished creative writer. The innovative poetry, prose, drama, and audio works are published and produced in a variety of media using standard and experimental forms. A first-generation American citizen, born in Trenton, New Jersey, Gorski's parents and sister emigrated to the United States from Galicia, Poland (present-day Ukraine) following World War II, where two aunts and a grandmother were murdered by Ukrainian partisans. Her father joined the Polish Underground when aged fourteen, and later the United States Army, arriving with his family in the U.S. in 1949 on the "General Sturgis", which docked in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father did electrical work in Napoleonville before moving to New Jersey. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Canada, she moved with her first husband to Austin, Texas in 1977. She is married to her second husband, composer D'Jalma Garnier. Her public career began in New Orleans during 1973, illustrating for the infamous "NOLA Express" underground newspaper and hawking the new issues on the corner. The archives of "NOLA Express" are now housed in the University of Connecticut. Gorski and Charles Bukowski are two of the most notable contributors to the "NOLA Express". There, she befriended Delta blues musician Babe Stovall and often kept him company while he performed for tourists in Jackson Square receiving tips into his open guitar case. A video of them at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was made but lost. Soon after moving to Austin, she divorced and began her poetry and theater careers in earnest by falling into the "[a]tmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved ... artists of the time toward intense self-actualization." She completed, produced, and directed a one-act play script with the title "Booby, Mama!" that is an inventive form she named "neo-verse drama". The art memoir of the production states that the verse play was based on a conceptual art cut-up form of writing made famous by William Burroughs.