War in Ukraine: Gender & Poetry

Yuliya Charnyshova is a Belarusian poet and a researcher of Anglohphone and Slavonic poetry of the 20th–21st centuries. She was born in Minsk in 1998 and is now living in Lviv, Ukraine. Her work in Russian and English has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders (as a co-translator), and F-Pismo, among other forums. She's also the editor of Danyil Zadorozhnyi's bilingual (written in Ukrainian and Russian) poetry book Nebezpechni Formy Blyz'kosti ("Dangerous Forms of Intimacy," Dnipro: Gerda press, 2021).

Anna Gruver, a Ukrainian poet and essayist, was born in 1996 in Donetsk. She is the author of the 2019 book of poems Nothing Was Found at Your Request (translated title). Her poems have been translated into English, Polish, Hebrew, Romanian, Lithuanian, and Russian, and have been published in particular in the journals Sho, F-letter, in the media sites Litcentr, Soloneba, and in other fora. Gruver translates essays and contemporary poetry from Ukrainian into Polish and vice versa. Anna has translated a book by Katie Ferris Boysgirls from English into Ukrainian (2021). In 2019, Anna received third prize in the prestigious "Smoloskyp" literary competition for young writers. She was co-editor of the bilingual poetry journal Paradigma (2019–2021). Gruver also published interviews with famous Ukrainian writers, including Lyuba Yakmchuk, Iryna Shuvalova, Ostap Slyvynsky, Oksana Lutsyshyna. She is studying Hebrew Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Before the 2022 war, Anna lived in Kharkiv and Kyiv. She remains at present in Ukraine.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee in 1993, when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019), finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems appear in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvannia. Her dissertation, "Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry," pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart (@wtwa2020), a virtual poetry reading series born out of the pandemic but meant to outlast it. She is currently the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix Colelge and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband.