June 12, 2023: A bilingual reading by poets Galina Rymbu and Yanis Sinaiko. The poets, speaking from their home in Lviv, also participate in a brief panel discussion and Q&A session after they read. Kevin M. F. Platt reads his translations of their work and, along with Catherine Ciepiela, Ainsley Morse, and Stephanie Sandler, participates in the panel discussion.
Galina Rymbu was born in 1990 in the city of Omsk (Siberia, Russia) and lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She edited F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, as well as Gryoza, a website for contemporary poetry. She is the co-founder of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Prize for emerging Russian-language poets. She has published three books of poems in Russian: Moving Space of the Revolution (Peredvizhnoe prostranstvo perevorota, 2014), Time of the Earth (Vremia zemli, 2018), and Life in Space (Zhizn’ v prostranstve, 2018). Her essays on cinema, literature, and sexuality have appeared in Séance, Colta, Your Art, and other journals. English translations of her work have appeared in numerous journals, and a translation of Life in Space by Joan Brooks and others was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020. Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages and stand-alone collections of her work have been published in Latvian, Dutch, Swedish, English, and Romanian.
Yanis Sinaiko is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1990 in L'viv (Ukraine). In 2013 he graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Ivan Franko L'viv National University. MA at Political Philosophy and Political Science. He published two collections of poems Angel-Konstruktor (Angel Constructor) (Kyiv, Locia, 2017), Iz glubiny porazheniia vida (From the depths of the species’ defeat) (Kharkiv, kntxt, 2019). His poems and other works have been translated into English, Italian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Hebrew, etc. and have been published in literary journals including Ukrainian Literature in Translation, SHO (WHAT), Vozdukh (Air), Snob, Helikopter, etc. In 2016 he co-founded the online platform for poetry in translation Umbrella on the literary portal Litcentr. He also worked as an editor of the micro media for contemporary poetry GRYOZA (DREAM). Sinaiko’s poems were nominated for the Arkady Dragomoshchenko International Price for young Russophone poets (2015, 2017). In 2017-2018, he acted as a performer, author, and co-director for the cross-media event (a collaboration of poetry, music, and digital spaces) Angel-Constructor (Angel Constructor) based on Sinaiko’s book by the same name. He has curated and participated in various literary events and festivals, including the Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry organized by the Danylo Husar Struk Programme in Ukrainian Literature of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the L’viv Book Forum, the Kyiv Book Arsenal, Kyiv Poetry Week, etc. He was a guest author and participant at the discussion “Radical Politics and Radical Poetics in Russia and Ukraine today” at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 2018), and a guest author for the project “Poets in Need” on behalf of University of Pennsylvania and PEN America (2022). He has translated selected poems, prose, and other fiction and non-fiction works by authors including Charles Reznikoff, Michael Palmer, Jaan Kaplinsky, Galina Rymbu, Philip Pullman, Michael Spitzer, Edwin Morgan, Anna McDonald, etc. into Ukrainian and Russian.