Celebrating National Translation Month with Wanda Phipps (and translation partner Virlana Tkacz) and Larissa Shmailo.
Plus open mic (no theme).
Curated by Claudia Serea. Co-hosting by Jerry T. Johnson
Zoom and Facebook livestream
To watch directly on Zoom and to read on the open mic, you must register via Eventbrite by 3:30pm on the day of the event. The features will also be live-streamed to the great weather for MEDIA facebook page.
**This will be our only open mic in September. We are planning on returning to fully-vaccinated live events at the Parkside Lounge from October 3, subject to current safety advice.
Wanda Phipps is a writer and translator. Her books include Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa, etc. in NYC. She’s curated reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and written about the arts for Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and others. She is now the fiction editor for the online arts journal Boog City and her new book, Mind Honey, has just been published by Automomedia. You can also find her work in the latest great weather for MEDIA anthology, Paper Teller Diorama.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, writing coach, and critic. Shmailo's new novel is Sly Bang (Spuyten Duyvil); her first novel is Patient Women (BlazeVOX). Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country (MadHat), #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist EBooks). A new poetry collection, Dora/Lora, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Shmailo’s poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo’s work has appeared in the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket) and over 25 others. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Garage Museum of Moscow, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society. Shmailo leads the workshop Writing Resilience for people affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness. Please see more about Shmailo at her website or at Wikipedia.
Virlana Tkacz heads the Yara Arts Group and has directed almost forty original shows at La MaMa Theatre in New York, as well as in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar, and Ulan Ude. She was award an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for her translations with Wanda Phipps. Together they have been translating Ukrainian poetry since 1989 and have received the Agni Poetry Translation Prize, the National Theatre Translation Fund Award and thirteen translation grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. What We Live For/What We Die For: Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan with fifty translations by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps was published by Yale University Press in 2019. Their translations have also appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and are integral to the theater pieces created by Yara Arts Group.