Language, Silence and the Spaces that Shape Us

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004, and Musica Humanna (Chapiteau Press, 2002), and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. He is on the creative writing faculty at Princeton University. 

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears, Collected Body, and her most recent book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast translation prize and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she is the editor of Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets offering a conversation about how Eastern European poets view themselves, their contemporaries, their century, and the place of their region in the millennia. She teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.

Nikola Madžirov is the author of Remnants of Another Age and Relocated Stones, which received the Hubert Burda European Poetry Award and the prestigious Miladinov Brothers Award. He was awarded the Studentski Zbor Award for Locked in the City and the Aco Karamanov prize for Somewhere Nowhere. Born into a family of Balkan War refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, Madzirov has gone on to participate in many international literary festivals and events in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, and he has received several international awards and fellowships.