Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
Halyna Kruk (1974) is an award-winning poet and prose writer, translator, and scholar from Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, Grown-Up (2017), (Co)existence (2013), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Footprints on Sand, and Journeys in Search of a Home (both 1997), a collection of short stories, Anyone but Me(2021), which won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize, and four children’s books. Two of them, Marko Travels Around the World and The Littlest One, have been translated into 15 languages. Her numerous literary awards include the Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, the 2023 Women in Arts Award, the 2021 BookForum Best Book Award, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize, and the Hranoslov Award. Her latest book of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, was recently published in English translation in the US. Kruk is the co-creator of various multimedia projects including The BookWar (2021) in collaboration with electronical musician Yurko Yefremov and singer Halyna Breslavets and the poetry and music performance The Resistance of Matter (2016). She holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature (2001). Kruk is a member of Ukrainian PEN. She lives in Lviv and teaches European and Ukrainian baroque literature at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv
A resident of western and central Ukraine for nearly five years, Ali Kinsella’s published works include essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to films. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s Anna’s Other Days, due out from Harvard Press in 2023. In 2021, she was awarded Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. Her co-translation with Dzvinia Orlowsky from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry and winner of the 2022 AAUS Prize for Translation. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. She and Dzvinia are working on a volume of Halyna Kruk’s poetry in translation, to be published by Lost Horse Press in 2024.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six full-length poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (2009) for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as the 2019 co-winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. In 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Her and Ali’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024 and her new poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall, 2024. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, founding director of Night Riffs: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. and Poet-in-Residence at the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing.
