Lost in Living

Halyna Kruk (1974) is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and scholar. 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 which have been translated into 15 languages. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails was her first volume of poetry published in English (Arrowsmith Press, 2022). 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. She holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature (2001). Kruk is a member of Ukrainian PEN; she lives and teaches in Lviv. Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of six poetry collections including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read" in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her new poetry book, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in fall 2024.Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for twelve years. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko's novella, Anna's Other Days, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. In 2021, she was awarded a Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno's Eternal Calendar. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. Her other published translations include pieces by Stanislav Aseyev, Lyubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Myroslav Laiuk, Bohdana Matiiash, Olena Stiazhkina, and others.

A gathering of tender, beyond-wise descriptions of Appalachia and its citizenry…Anna Leigh Knowles' poems resonate with stories of finding joy and love and connectedness in a land of considerable heartbreak." - Roy Bentley