The Happy Body

Jerzy Gregorek immigrated to the United States together with his wife Aniela from Poland in 1986, as political refugees during the Solidarity Movement. An accomplished athlete, he subsequently won four World Weightlifting Championships and established one world record. In 2000, Jerzy and Aniela founded UCLA's weightlifting team, becoming its head coaches. As co-creator of The Happy Body Program, Jerzy has been mentoring people for more than 30 years, helping them attain a happy and healthy lifestyle. The poems in this book developed in response to the struggles of the many individuals who have tried to implement the simple but often difficult solutions to the obstacles they faced with regard to exercise and food. In 1998, Jerzy earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review. His poem "Family Tree" was the winner of Amelia magazine's Charles William Duke Longpoem Award in 1998. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Jerzy a literature fellowship to support the translation from Polish into English of selected poems by Maurycy Szymel. This culminated in the publication in 2013 of The Shy Hand of a Jew by Cross-Cultural Communications, which the following year published a collection of Jerzy's own poetry, entitled Sacred and Scared. As a teenager from a poor family in communist Poland, Jerzy's circumstances led to his becoming an alcoholic from age 15 to 18, during which time his life was largely a blur. At the age of 23, as an Olympic style weightlifting athlete, he incurred an injury that resulted in the paralysis of his legs for several months, removing him from the sport for some 18 years. In this book, Jerzy creatively combines his knowledge and experience in coaching and lifestyle training-utilizing his personal experiences with addiction, injury and recovery-with his talent as a poet, to help guide readers toward constructive changes, to make a positive difference in their lives. Jerzy and Aniela live with their daughter, Natalie, in Woodside, California.