Rita Gabis

Johanna Lawshea

Rita Gabis is an award-winning poet and prose writer. Her grants and fellowships include a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for creative nonfiction and residencies at Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Field. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet: My Grandfather’s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for Truth. (Bloomsbury), Gabis comes to terms with an unthinkable revelation about her family story. Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet is a history and family memoir, documenting “the holocaust by bullets” with a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather’s birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.