San Francisco Bay Area readers, take note: for the second year in a row, Punctured Lines is producing an event during San Francisco’s Lit Crawl.
On Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia, a group of Bay Area authors will come together with poetry, stories and essays centered on Ukraine. Several of these authors have been regulars on our blog, and we’re delighted to introduce a few new names to our line up from last year.
This event was a long time in the making. As Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty against Russia’s assault, it remains paramount to continue to tell our stories and to refute the propaganda narratives that are festering in the social media spaces. We will read pieces exploring our connections to the part of the world we associate with home and exile, and where many of our friends and relatives are suffering as a result of Russia’s horrific actions. We work in the genres of fiction, poetry, YA, flash, journalism and other literary forms to tell our stories.
Please come out to the reading if you’re local, and please help us spread the word if you’re not.
Polina Barskova is the author of 13 collections of poems and 3 books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and was published in English in 2022 by NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology WRITTEN IN THE DARK (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: THIS LAMENTABLE CITY (Tupelo Press), THE ZOOM IN WINTER (Melville House), RELOCATIONS (Zephyr Press) and AIR RAID (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). Barskova teaches Russian Literature at UC Berkeley.
Maggie Levantovskaya was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, the LA Times, Current Affairs and Lithub. Her day job is teaching other people to write at Santa Clara University.
Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad in 1972. The winner of such prestigious prizes as the Andrei Bely Prize and the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize, she now faces the situation when her current publisher, NLO, is afraid to print her work due to the expanded anti-LGBTQ laws signed by Putin in December 2022. Her earlier book, written in collaboration with Lida Yusupova, LOVE HAS FOUR HANDS, was already removed from Russian bookstores due to the tightening grip of Putin’s regime. Meklina came to the US in 1994 with refugee status. With Anne Fisher, she curated a folio of Russian LGBTQ poetry and prose in translation to English which was printed by The Brooklyn Rail/In Translation. Now she is forced to abandon her native language in favor of English.
Nina Rodenko is a winner of the 2022 Clark-Gross Scholarship Award for her debut novel, AMERICANKA, which is currently in its final draft. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Bookstr, Prometheus Dreaming, and Watershed Review. Born in Ukraine, Nina lives in San Francisco. Find her on Instagram @nina.rodenko.
Masha Rumer is the author of a nonfiction book about immigrant families, PARENTING WITH AN ACCENT (Beacon Press, 2021; out in paperback in 2022). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parents, Chicago Tribune and others, winning awards from the New York Press Association. Find her on Twitter at @mashadc and Instagram @masharumer.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY set between Ukraine and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, April 2024). She has written about Eastern Europe for The New York Times, TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, USA Today, Narrative, and others. She can be found at www.sashavasilyuk.com and on Twitter @sashavasilyuk.
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and four Russian-language story collections. She has published fiction and essays in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. She co-edits Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
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