Radical Poetry Reading with Ostap Kin

Ostap Kin is the editor, and co-translator with John Hennessy, of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, forthcoming in 2022) and the editor of an anthology New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press, 2019). He is also the co-translator, with John Hennessy, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan (Lost Horse Press, 2020) and, with Vitaly Chernetsky, of Songs for a Dead Rooster, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych (Lost Horse Press, 2018).

Born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, Ilya Kaminsky arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He’s the author of Deaf Republic, Dancing In Odessa and has co-edited and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. His poems have been translated into over twenty languages, and his books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”

Pushcart prize poet and award-winning translator Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six poetry collections including A Handful of Bees, reprinted for the Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary Series; Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, winner of a Sheila Motton Book Award; and Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as a 2019 winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from Ukrainian, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Selected Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021.

Scholar, translator, and poet Max Rosochinsky is from Simferopol, Crimea. His translations appeared in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Best European Fiction series from Dalkey Archive Press. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he won first place in the 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competition and co-edited Words for War, a NEH-winning anthology of contemporary Ukrainian war poetry. His poetry manuscript had been nominated for the PEN International New Voices Award, and his translations for the Pushcart Prize. He’s the co-translator of Apricots of Donbas, The Voices of Babyn Yar, and others. Max earned his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University.

Poet, screenwriter, and playwright Lyuba Yakimchuk was born in 1985 in Pervomaisk, Luhansk region. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Apricots of Donbas, that received the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (NYC, USA). Her poems have been translating into twenty languages. She has also authored two film scripts and two plays. Yakimchuk has received the International Slavic Poetic Award, the Bohdan-Ihor Antonych Prize, and Smoloskyp Prize, three of Ukraine’s most prestigious awards for young poets. In 2022 she performed her poem «Prayer» in Free project by John Legend during Grammy Awards. Kyiv’s New Time magazine listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential people in the arts in Ukraine.