Book Release Celebration: Jennings, Makhno, Tkacz, Turczyn

December 10, 2022, 5:00 PM 

In-person event at the Shevchenko Scientific Society
63 Fourth Ave (between 9th and 10th Streets) New York, NY10003

In celebration of poetry books released in 2022, Shevchenko Scientific Society presents four poets. Olena Jennings will read from The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press.) Vasyl Makhno will read from Paper Bridge (Plamen Press.) Virlana Tkacz will read from Three Wooden Trunks (Lost Horse Press.) Christina Turczyn will read from The Sky Inside Your Body (Poets of Queens Press and Yara Arts Group.) Join us in launching these books!

 Books will be available at the event.

OLENA JENNINGS is a writer and translator. Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her poetry collection, The Age of Secrets, was released in September from Lost Horse Press. Her translation with Oksana Lutsyshyna from Ukrainian of Kateryna Kalytko’s Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone was released in October from Lost Horse Press, and her translation of Vasyl Makhno’s poetry collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series and small press.

VASYL MAKHNO is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, the most recent of which is One Sail House (2021). He has also published a book of short stories, The House in Baiting Hollow (2015), a novel, The Eternal Calendar (2019), and four books of essays, The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006), Horn of Plenty  (2011), Suburbs and Borderland (2019), and Biking along the Ocean (2020).  Makhno’s works have been widely translated into many languages; his books have been published in Germany, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and the US., and most recently, Paper Bridge,(2022), translated by Olena Jennings.

VIRLANA TKACZ is the artistic director of Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York and has created thirty-nine original productions that performed in New York, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulan Ude, and Ulaanbaatar, as well as China. Virlana is the recipient of the NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship, three Fulbright Fellowships, the National Theatre Translation Award and numerous NYSCA grants for her translations with Wanda Phipps. In 2019, their translation of poems by Serhiy Zhadan, What We Live For, What We Die For, was published by Yale University Press. Three Wooden Trunks is a collection of poems about memory and Virlana’s family in America.

CHRISTINA TURCZYN, a writer and visual artist, has contributed watercolors to twenty exhibits including Cornell Has Talent. In her career as a writer, she has over one hundred publications in diverse magazines and journals. Those span international events covered at the Guggenheim and The World Around Summit. She is a member of the Women’s Foreign Policy Group. The Sky Inside Your Body is a convergence between poetry and nature. Among the seasons, winter stands out most, as we witness how the trauma of war and the pains of being a refugee are reflected in the next generation. Turczyn shows her mastery over the prose poem and closes the books with a cinematic universe.