Fourth Annual Oleg Woolf Memorial Readings

Tomas Venclova (b. 1937) is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980 he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations (received jointly with Czesław Miłosz), and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, and made her American debut in 2008 with Factory of Tears, followed, in 2011, by Collected Body (both Copper Canyon Press). She is the editor of two poetry anthologies, Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets, and Gossip and Metaphysics: Prose and Poetry of Russian Modernist Poets (with Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris). Mort has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, Burda Poetry Prize for Eastern European authors, and Crystal of Vilenica. Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University. 

Vasyl Makhno (b.1964) is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He is the author of ten collections of poetry. He has also published two books of essays The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006) and Horn of Plenty (2011), and two plays Coney Island (2006) and Bitch/Beach Generation (2007). He has also translated Zbigniew Herbert’s and Janusz Szuber’s poetry from Polish into Ukrainian, and edited an anthology of young Ukrainian poets from the 1990’s. He is the 2013 recipient of Serbia’s Povele Morave Prize in Poetry and BBC Book of the Year Award 2015.  Makhno currently lives in New York City.

RACC's events are made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, Cojeco and Tianaderrah Foundation.