Author Event: Danny Klecko, Polish Bread Maker
April 10 @ 6:30 pm
The Friends of the Winona Public Library will hold their annual meeting on Thursday, April 10th at 6:30pm in the Library’s Central Exchange Room. The event will feature Danny Klecko. Klecko is the author of the 2020 Midwest Book Award Winner Hitman-Baker-Casketmaker. He is a poet, Twin Cities Polish bread baker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar.
Hitman-Baker-Casketmaker is a book of poems focusing on the circumstances behind the 2018 demise of St. Agnes Baking Company just days before the Twin Cities hosted Super Bowl LII at U.S. Bank Stadium where the bakery was scheduled to be a primary vendor for the event. Klecko writes not of financial loss, but of the emotional fall-out of disbanding the bakery’s loyal and talented crew, most of whom are immigrants. He tells of assembling the workers to tell them about their fate, of sharing a final lunch with a longtime member of his team, and offers meaningful reflections on those difficult days and the ones that followed.