When: Saturday, November 9, 2019 at 7 PM – 10 PM EST
Where: Java’s Cafe, 16 Gibbs St, Rochester, New York 14604
Join us for a lively evening of stories, poems, and performance art
by nonconformist writers from the former Soviet Union, in English.
Olga Livshin‘s book A LIFE REPLACED
braids together poems on immigration in America with translations from
Anna Akhmatova and our contemporary Vladimir Gandelsman, winner of
Russia’s highest award for poetry, the Moscow Reckoning. Many poems are
responses to these two voices; some are stand-alone works. Maggie
Smith comments: “Livshin, who immigrated to the US from Russia as a
child, acknowledges the two Americas she knows firsthand: the one that
fears and demonizes, and the one that welcomes. A LIFE REPLACED is
astonishingly beautiful, intelligent, and important.”
A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Olga Zilberbourg will introduce her English-language short story collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.
“The thread connecting these tales,” Anna Kasradze writes for The
Moscow Times (ed. Michele Berdy), “is each protagonist’s attempt to come
to terms with an identity that is always in flux, transitioning between
various contexts such as emigration, motherhood, partnership, and
employment.” Olga is the author of three Russian-language books (the
latest of which “Хлоп-страна,” Издательство Время, 2016). She has
published fiction and essays in Alaska Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time,
Narrative Magazine, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and elsewhere. She co-moderates the San Francisco Writers
Workshop.
Opening for the two Olgas is a poetry performance by translator Dmitri Manin. Avant-garde sonnets by Genrikh Sapgir
will be presented on shirts, worn by both Olgas and Dmitri. Sapgir
(1928-1999), a hugely acclaimed poet in Russia, first presented his
philosophical and funny Sonnets on Shirts–on actual men’s shirts–in
1975. His performance made a sensation amidst an atmosphere of official,
staid, highly traditional, print-only Soviet literature. Manin revives
his work and re-enacts it in English, using contemporary bodies and
presences to channel Sapgir.
Java’s–a
ten-minute walk or three-minute Lyft drive from the Floreano Convention
Center–will have food and drink for us to regale us into the night with
literature and pleasure.