A webinar with prominent contemporary Ukrainian poets who continue to write during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Through their poetry, Alex Averbuch, Daryna Gladun, Iia Kiva, Julia Musakovska, and Oksana Maksymchuk, reflect on the catastrophic events that have been happening to their homeland since February 24, 2022. Some of these authors have been displaced and work in exile. The others stayed in Ukraine and keep working under continuous shelling in the circumstances of a humanitarian catastrophe with daily power outages and reduced heat and water supply in their homes. They document the war experiences of their people and themselves in a unique way – lyrical, metaphoric, and psychological. Their poetry creates the language to express the most difficult emotions and to reflect on the shock, suffering, resistance, love, and loss. It is an endeavor to make sense of nonsensical and to experience the unforgivable, while their beloved and close ones are on the front lines defending millions of Ukrainian lives.

About the speakers:

Yuliya Musakovska is an award-winning poet and translator. She is the author of five poetry collections in Ukrainian including: The God of Freedom (2021) and Iron (2022). Yuliya has received numerous literary awards in Ukraine, including the prominent Smoloskyp Poetry Award for young authors and the Dictum Prize from Krok Publishing House. Her individual poems have been translated into over 25 languages. Yuliya is a translator of Tomas Tranströmer to Ukrainian and of contemporary Ukrainian authors to English. She is a member of PEN Ukraine.

Iya Kiva is poet, translator and journalist, member of PEN Ukraine. She is the author of two collections of poetry, "Farther from Heaven (2018) and "The First Page of Winter" (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarus writers "We will awaken as others: conversations with contemporary Belarus authors about the past, the present, and the future of Belarus" (2021). Her poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. Kiva is the recipient of a Gaude Polonia fellowship (2021), the Dartmouth College writer support program (2022), Documenting Ukraine program (Austria, 2022) and others.

Alex Averbuch is a poet, translator, and literary historian. He is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. His poetry deals with the issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory. His latest book Zhydivs’kyi korol' (The Jewish King) was published in 2021. He holds PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies from the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta.

Daryna Gladun is a Ukrainian poet, translator, artist, and researcher. Her major interests lie in the field of contemporary Ukrainian literature and poetry performance. She has published dozens of articles in various journals and participated in numerous scientific conferences in Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, and the USA. Gladun is a laureate of numerous literary contests, a recipient of fellowships from the President of Ukraine, International Writers’ and Translators’ House, House of Europe, Staromiejski House of Culture, Potsdam University, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy and a recipient of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych and Smoloskyp prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an award-winning anthology of contemporary poetry. Oksana won first place in the Richmond Lattimore and Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She is the co-translator of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk; and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

Olha Khometa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages at the University of Toronto, where she is working on her dissertation, entitled “The Politics of Style: Late Modernism in the Ukrainian, Jewish Russophone and Russian Literatures in the 1930s.” Olha earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with a major in Ukrainian Language and Literature, at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine. She completed the summer school program at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute in 2014. She is a co-organizer of the series of literary readings entitled Contemporary Ukrainian Diaspora & Emigre Literature in cooperation with the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation in Toronto.

Sponsored by: Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, CERES, and Slavic Languages & Literatures.

свернуть