TIME CHANGE: Poetry From Ukraine: Live Reading and Discussion

When

Thursday November 9, 2023: 6:00pm to 7:45pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 4th Floor Meeting Room

Description

Due to an error, the start time for this event was previously listed as 5:00pm. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Join us for a poetry reading and discussion featuring Ukrainian poets Alex Averbuch, Oksana Maksymchuk, and Max Rosochinsky. They will read read from their recently published books and share their thoughts about the role of poetry in resistance.

Alex Averbuch, poet, translator, and scholar, is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Alex will read, in the original Ukrainian and in English translation, from his latest book Zhydivsky korol (The Jewish King, a 2023 finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature). Averbuch's poetry deals with interwoven Jewish-Ukrainian relations through the prism of his family history and Ukraine's multiethnic past and present. The book features poeticized documentary materials related to the Second World War: letters by Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine, interwoven with letters by Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives, as well as poems about the Russo-Ukrainian war currently taking place in his home region of Luhans’k. Unsettling but ultimately liberatory de-specifications of ethnos, language, and sexuality relieve trigger-points in Ukraine’s history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her poetry appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Ukrainian-language poetry collections Xenia and Lovy, and is a recipient of Antonych and Smoloskyp prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets. She is currently a visiting writer in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Oksana will read from her collection Still City forthcoming with Carcanet Press in 2024.  

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. Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Max will read translations featured in collections he co-edited and co-translated as well as English-language translations of his own poems.

This event is in conjunction with the exhibition Guardian Passage: The Power of Ukrainian Cultural Memory in the Face of War  and CREES panel on November 9 at noon with the three poets supported by the Arts & Resistance Semester at the University of Michigan.