Dejan Stojanović

Dejan Stojanović is a Serbian American poet, writer, essayist, philosopher, businessman, and former journalist, born on 11 March 1959 in Peć, in the Autonomous District of Kosovo and Metohija, then part of PR Serbia in FPR Yugoslavia. His life and work belong to the late Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary world, with a later chapter in the United States. In 1972, he moved with his family to Sutomore, near Bar, Montenegro, where he completed secondary school. He later attended the University of Pristina in Kosovo. Though he was drawn most strongly to philosophy and the arts in his youth, he earned a degree in law.

Stojanović began writing poetry in the late 1970s, keeping his work private for three to four years before publishing poems in literary magazines in the former Yugoslavia. His work appeared in Serbian magazines including Stremljenja and Jedinstvo in Priština, and Gradina in Niš. By 1983, he had become a member of the Karagač literary club in his hometown of Peć, where he served first as secretary and later as president. In that role, he conducted interviews with local artists from Kosovo, an early sign of the wide literary and artistic curiosity that would mark his career.

His first poetry book, Krugovanje, translated as Circling: 1978–1987, was ready for publication in 1983 but did not appear until 1993. During that decade, some planned poems were replaced by newer work written between 1983 and 1986, and the final poem in the book was written in Chicago in 1991. His other poetry collections include The Sun Watches the Sun, The Sign and its Children, The Shape, The Creator, and Dance of Time. Most of his poems were first written in Serbian, compiled into six volumes, and later translated into English, with a selection also translated into French.

In early adulthood, Stojanović developed a philosophical system of ideas concerned mainly with metaphysical questions and the structure of the universe. He filled several hundred notebook pages with these ideas, as well as essays on language and literature. In 1999, shortly after the Kosovo war ended, those manuscripts and his carefully chosen library of more than a thousand books were lost in a fire while being held in his brother’s office in downtown Peć. That loss forms a stark background to poems already known for their reflective tone, compact structure, and attention to both the smallest and largest subjects, from stones to galaxies.

Stojanović also worked as a journalist. In 1990, he joined the Serbian magazine Pogledi and began interviewing Serbian writers in Belgrade, including Momo Kapor, Alek Vukadinović, and Nikola Milošević. During a visit to Paris that year, he interviewed Ljuba Popović, Petar Omčikus, Miloš Šobajić, and Jacques Claude Villard. In December 1990, he went to the United States as a foreign correspondent, intending to stay six months to a year. He interviewed prominent American writers including Saul Bellow, Charles Simic, and Steve Tesich, and remained in Chicago after the Yugoslav Wars began in 1991. His interview collection Conversations, published in 1999, received the Rastko Petrović Award from the Association of Writers of Serbia.

Critics have described Stojanović’s poetry as dense, carefully organized, philosophical, and marked by a recognizable system of thought. David Kecman called him a “cosmosophist,” while Branko Mikasinovich wrote that if elegance is represented by simplicity, these are “some of the most elegant verses imaginable.” That sense of disciplined clarity is close to Stojanović’s own line, “The most complicated skill is to be simple.” His words continue to speak to readers because they join thought and image without noise, returning again and again to language, form, the self, and the universe.