[New York, NY]

Polina Barskova and Valzhyna Mort at "Air Raid" Poetry reading
March 11, 2020, 6:00 pm
at Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE), Hunter College

Polina Barskova began writing poetry at the age of eight and published her first book in 1991. She left Russia at twenty to pursue a Ph.D. in Russian Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a degree and become an accomplished poet in her native St. Petersburg. Three books of Barskova’s poetry have been translated into English (This Lamentable City, Tupelo Press, 2010), The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011), and Relocations (Zephyr Press, 2015). A professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, Barskova works on the cultural representation of the Siege of Leningrad and is the author of Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (Northern Illinois UP, 2017). She has also edited Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), an anthology of verses written during the siege that remained unknown for decades. Barskova lives in Amherst, MA, and teaches at Hampshire College. In 2015, she received Andrey Bely Prize for her book of prose Living Pictures. Her play under the same title has been staged at Moscow Theatre of Nations. She is now working with Valzhyna Mort on a new book of her poetry in English, Air Raid.

Poet and translator Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, and made her American debut in 2008 with Factory of Tears, followed in 2011 by Collected Body. She is the editor of two poetry anthologies and the recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clamitt Fellowship, the Gulf Coast Journal Prize in Translation, as well as a number of European fellowships and prizes. Her third book of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is coming out in 2020 from FSG. For her work on Polina Barskova’s collection, Air Raid, Mort has been recently awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Ithaca, NY, and teaches at Cornell University.

Please RSVP on our website and we will put your name on our guest list. Please have a photo ID to get a pass to the Hunter West Building. From the reception desk at the entrance to Hunter West, take the escalator to Floor 3, walk across the sky bridge to Hunter East Building, take the elevator to Floor 7, and present your pass to security. Hemmerdinger Screening Room is down the hall.

More information on this series here.

Facebook event here.