In conversation with Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at HURI
Books are available for purchase on the HURI Books website.
This event is organized by HURI Books, the publications program at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Furious Harvests transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of the grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.
Alex Averbuch is an interdisciplinary scholar, poet, and translator. His poetry has been translated into multiple languages, with standalone books published in English, German, Italian, and Polish. He is the author of four books of poetry. Alex is an assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and collegiate fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the collection Zhydivskyi korol' (King of Kikes), which was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature. English translations of his poems have appeared in Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. With Max Rosochinsky, she won the first place in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowment's for the Arts Translation Fellowship. For the translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022), Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky were awarded the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize.
Max Rosochinsky is a poet, scholar, and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska (Harvard Ukrainian Reserch Institute, 2022). Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, and others.