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.
Born out of the pain and loss of a fragmented present, Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in the original and in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Since war broke out in her native Donetsk in 2014, she has become a prominent voice of Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens, finding new metaphors to express the ongoing uncertainties of this time. Kiva first began publishing in her native Russian, but, since the Donbas war, she has shifted to writing in Ukrainian. Her poems also reflect her mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish background and contribute to defining contemporary Ukraine—a culturally and linguistically diverse sovereign country. As Ukraine struggles for its existence, Kiva offers lyric poems that acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.
Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist from Donetsk, now living in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Further from Heaven (Podal´she ot raya, 2018) and The First Page of Winter (Persha storinka zymy, 2019), and the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and translations.
Amelia Glaser is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at U.C. San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020).
Yuliya Ilchuk is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (2021).