Please, join us for a powerful evening of Ukrainian poetry at Globus Books, featuring Polina Barskova and Ostap Kin.

The reading and discussion will be centered on 'Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond' and Marianna Kiyanovska’s 'The Voices of Babyn Yar' — a powerful collection of poems that honors the victims of the Holocaust. These works span diverse literary canons, traditions, and time periods, offering a profound and evocative language to convey the suffering and destruction endured by the Ukrainian Jewish population during this tragic chapter of history.

Bilingual event Ukrainian-English
Free with RSVP

Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, which received an honorable mention for Best Translation Prize from American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Best Translation Prize. He is the translator, with John Hennessy, of Yuri Andrukhovych’s collection Set Change (NYRB/Poets, 2024), the anthology Babyn Yar, and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, which won the Derek Walcott Prize and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s collection Songs for a Dead Rooster.

Polina Barskova is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at UC Berkeley and a renowned poet and scholar. Previously, she taught Russian literature at Hampshire College, Amherst, and Smith.
Her scholarly work focuses on the Siege of Leningrad, including the anthology Written in the Dark and her book Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2016). Barskova’s Living Pictures (NYRB, 2022) blends caustic humor and vivid imagination to explore historical and personal traumas and how we cope with experiences that defy comprehension.