FREE, RSVP HERE

Join us for an intimate evening with Yaryna Chornohuz, an award-winning Ukrainian poet and senior corporal in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in conversation with Amelia Glaser, UCSD professor and English translator of Yaryna’s poetry.

A combat medic and reconnaissance soldier serving with Ukraine’s 140th Marine Reconnaissance Battalion since 2019, Chornohuz writes from the front lines — literally. Her 2023 collection, [dasein: defence of presence], won Ukraine’s highest literary honor, the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, in 2024. She has been profiled by the New Yorker and the New York Times, named one of Ukraine’s 100 most influential women by Focus magazine, and has testified before the US Congress on the need to support Ukraine’s defense.

During the evening, Yaryna will read from her two poetry collections available in English translation — Nobody’s Saffron and [dasein: defence of presence] — in both English and Ukrainian, followed by a conversation and audience Q&A. Amelia Glaser will moderate the discussion and speak to the process and challenges of translating Yaryna’s work.

Guests will have the opportunity to purchase Yaryna’s poetry collections in English translation and have their copies signed.

This is a rare opportunity to meet one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature!

About the Series
This event is part of Verses from the War, a series of readings with Ukrainian writers organized by House of Ukraine. Yaryna’s US tour is organized and supported by Razom for Ukraine.

Event language: English (with some poems read in Ukrainian)
Admission: Free, RSVP here

Biographies
Yaryna Chornohuz is a Ukrainian poet, combat medic, and senior corporal in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She studied Ukrainian language and literature at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy before enlisting in 2019, and has served since 2020 as a combat medic and reconnaissance soldier with the 140th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion of the Ukrainian Marine Corps. She is the author of two poetry collections: How the War Circle Bends (2020) and [dasein: defence of presence] (2023), the latter awarded Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Prize in 2024. Her work has also received the Women in Arts award for Literature (2024) and the Smoloskyp Publishing House literary prize (2020), and she was named to Focus magazine’s list of Ukraine’s 100 most influential women in 2021. Both of her collections have been translated into English by Amelia Glaser: Nobody’s Saffron (Arrowsmith Press) and [dasein: defence of presence] (Jantar Publishing). She has testified before the US Congress on funding for Ukraine’s military defense, and her poetry, activism, and military service have been profiled in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Kyiv Independent.

Amelia Glaser is a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she also directs the Institute for Arts and Humanities and holds an endowed chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern UP, 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020), and editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford UP, 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Her translations include Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Yaryna Chornohuz’s Nobody’s Saffron (Arrowsmith Press) and [dasein: defence of presence] (Jantar, 2025); and, with Yuliya Ilchuk, Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and Iya Kiva’s Silenced Dressed in Cyrillic Letters (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2026). Her current project, Ukraine: Nation of Poets, explores contemporary poetry from Ukraine.

For more information about the event, please contact Viktoria Barbaniuk, Cultural Director for Literary Programming at House of Ukraine, at viktoria.barbaniuk@gmail.com or (941) 336-9931