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Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: An Evening with Ukrainian poet Natalka Bilotserkivets.
Ukrainian poet Natalka Bilotserkivets (Harriman Resident at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris) will read poetry from her award-winning collection Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021). She will be joined by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowksy, the translators of her poetry into English. Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute) will moderate.
NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS is the author of six books of poetry and a volume of selected poems—We Shall Not Die in Paris (Ми помрем не в Парижі), published in three editions in 2015, 2018 and 2022. Her poetry has been translated into a dozen languages, including recent English translations of Subterranean Fire (2020, UK) and Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (2021, USA), and has been awarded many national and international prizes. Her works, known for lyricism and the quiet power of despair, became hallmarks of Ukraine’s literary life of the 1980-2000s and her poem “We’ll not Die in Paris” became the hymn of the post-Chornobyl generation of young Ukrainians that helped topple the Soviet Union and greeted the Independence of Ukraine in 1991. She lives and works in Kyiv and, since September 2022, has been a Harriman Resident at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
ALI KINSELLA has been translating from Ukrainian for eight years. Her published works include essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to various films. She holds an MA from Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on the intersection of feminism and nationalism in small states. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Ali lived in Ukraine for nearly five years. She is currently in Chicago, where she also sometimes works as a baker.
Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, DZVINIA ORLOWSKY is author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna,was published by House Between Water Press in 2006, and in 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczslaw Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.
