Readings All That We Have Is a Voice

Writers from Ukraine Speaking to Writers in Boston

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Live from Boston:

James Wood | © privat James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. Wood is also the author of the novel The Book Against God; a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works; and a collection of essays, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019. His latest novel, Upstate, was published in 2018. He is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.

Robert Pinsky | © privat Robert Pinsky is one of the most important and influential American poets of his generation. His work has earned him the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, among other accolades. His anthology The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His most recent poetry collection, At the Foundling Hospital, was published in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Other poetry collections include Selected Poems (FSG, 2011), Gulf Music (FSG, 2007), and Jersey Rain (FSG, 2001). In 2013 WW Norton published Singing School: Learning to Read (and Write) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, a unique combination anthology, personal essay, and textbook. His landmark, best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. Pinsky is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.

John Fulton | © privat John Fulton has published three books of fiction: Retribution, which won the Southern Review Fiction Prize, the novel More Than Enough, and The Animal Girl, which was long listed for the Story Prize. His fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and been published in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. New stories are forthcoming or have recently appeared in The Sun, Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, and his third story collection The Flounder will appear in the spring of 2023. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

E.C. Osondu | © privat E.C. Osondu was born in Nigeria, where he worked for many years as an advertising copywriter. Winner of the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing, he is the author of a novel, This House Is Not For Sale (Harper, 2015), and two story collections: Alien Stories (BOA Editions, forthcoming 2021), winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, and Voice of America (Harper, 2010). His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Guernica, AGNI, and elsewhere. With William Pierce, he co-edited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction. He is associate professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island and a contributing editor of AGNI.


Jane Unrue | © privat Jane Unrue is the author of the novel Love Hotel, published by New Directions (2015); the short novels Life of a Star (2010) and The House (2000), both published by Burning Deck Press. She has taught writing courses at Brown University, Emerson College, Boston College, Wellesley College, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Harvard University. She directs the Harvard Scholars at Risk Program, which provides academic fellowships for scholars, artists, and writers who are at risk of persecution in their home countries. 


Shuchi Saraswat | © privat Shuchi Saraswat is assistant editor and nonfiction editor of AGNI. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Ecotone, Arrowsmith, Coffee House Writers Project, The Boston Globe, Women’s Review of Books, Literary Hub: Bookmarks, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Writers Omi at Ledig House, The Writers’ Room of Boston, Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She founded the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, a reading series focused on themes of migration, and in 2019 served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. She is the editor, with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, of “Futures: An AGNI Portfolio of Work in Translation” in AGNI 94 (fall 2021).

William Pierce | © privat William Pierce is coeditor of AGNI. Excerpts from his autofiction manuscript Twenty Sixteen can be found in Harvard Review, The Western Humanities Review, and on the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub. His short stories have appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere, and other work has appeared in Electric Literature, Little Star, Tin House online, The Writer’s Chronicle, Solstice, Glimmer Train, Consequence, and as part of MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber’s art project “The Alphabet,” commissioned by the Fitchburg Art Museum. Pierce is the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016), a monograph first serialized as a three-part essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books. With E. C. Osondu, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction.

Askold Melnyczuk | © privat Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. He has published four novels which have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Volodymyr Dibrova | © privat Volodymyr Dibrova was born in 1951 in Donetsk. Writer, playwright, translator, and literary critic, he was chair of the English Department at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy before moving to the US in 1993. Since then, he has taught Ukrainian language and literature at Harvard University. His translations include Samuel Beckett’s Watt, as well as work by Ionesco, Thoreau, Edward Lear and Vonnegaut. He’s published six books of fiction, three plays and a book of literary criticism. His latest work is a book on the poet Taras  Shevchenko.

Andrea Cohen | © privat Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. A new book of poems, Everything, was published by Four Way Books in 2021. Other collections include Nightshade (2019). Unfathoming (2017), Furs Not Mine (2015), Kentucky Derby (2011), Long Division (Salmon, 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (199. Cohen’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.




Live from Ukraine via Zoom:

Kateryna Mikhalitsyna | © Kateryna Mikhalitsyna Kateryna Mikhalitsyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, literary editor, columnist, member of PEN Ukraine and a volunteer. Award winning author of more than 20 books for children and several collections of poetry. Her picture book “Who grows in the park” illustrated by Oksana Bula has been listed in The White Raven Catalogue-2016, and the “Who grows” series has been published in 8 countries already. A non-fiction book “Reactors Do not Explode. A Brief History of Chornobyl Disaster” written together with Stanislav Dvornytsky has been listed in The White Raven Catalogue-2021. Kateryna lives in Lviv with her partner, their three children and an adopted dog.

Victoria Amelina | © privat Victoria Amelina was born in 1986 in Lviv, where she resides. She is a Ukrainian novelist and author of children’s books. After a successful career in the IT industry, she decided to dedicate herself to writing. She is the recipient of the prestigious Joseph Conrad Award (2021). Her writings have been translated into Polish, Czech, Dutch, English, and German. She is also a prominent social activist, and the organizer of the New York Festival, held in the Ukrainian town of New York, located in the Donetsk region. She is a member of Ukrainian PEN.

Oksana Lutsyshyna | © privat Oksana Lutsyshyna 's most recent novel Ivan and Phoebe (2019) won two of the most prestigious literary awards in Ukraine, in 2020 and 2021, respectively: the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize and Taras Shevchenko National Prize in fiction. The novel is forthcoming in the English translation by Nina Murray from Deep Vellum Publishing in 2022. Oksana Lutsyshyna's poetry collection, Persephone Blues, in the English translation, was released in 2019 by Arrowsmith. She also translates Ukrainian authors into English in collaboration with Olena Jennings. 

Foto Yuliya Musakovska | © privat Yuliya Musakovska (born in 1982) is a Ukrainian poet and translator, a member of PEN Ukraine. She is the author of five poetry collections, The God of Freedom (2021), Men, Women and Children (2015), Hunting the Silence (2014), Masks (2011), and Exhaling, Inhaling (2010). Her poems have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Polish, Bulgarian, etc. Yuliya Musakovska also translates Swedish poetry into Ukrainian and contemporary Ukrainian poetry into English. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards in Ukraine, including Krok Publishing House’s DICTUM Prize (2014), the Smoloskyp Poetry Award (2010), the Ostroh Academy Vytoky Award (2010), the Bohdan Antonych Prize (2009), and the Hranoslov Award (2008).

Marjana Savka | © Marjana Savka Marjana Savka was born in Kopychyntsi, Ternopil oblast, in 1973. She published her first poetry collection, Naked Riverbeds, at the age of twenty-one. Eight other award-winning books, for which she received several awards, have appeared since then, including four poetry collections and three children’s books. A singer, actress, activist, and leader of the band The Three Mariannas, she edited We and She, an anthology of poems by female writers from Lviv, Ukraine, where she lives. She is cofounder of the Old Lion Publishing House which also operates a number of bookstores throughout the country. Marjana is the winner of “Torch” award (1998) and the International Vasyl Stus Prize (2003).

A hybrid event co-sponsored by Goethe-Institut Boston, the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, and Agni.

Masks required.

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