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Published: Thu May 19 2022
Eva Lundsager, A Pause (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Online 2022 Politics Reading War
For the Record: Conversations with Ukrainian Writers

This series of intimate wartime conversations between Melnyczuk and an expanding roster of Ukrainian writers appears in collaboration with Arrowsmith Press and the Ukrainian poet and filmmaker Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko.

Introduction:

The Conversations:
Iya Kiva
Borys and Liudmila Khersonsky (with Marie Howe)
Volodymyr Yermolenko
Victoria Amelina and Roman Avramenko (with Jacki Lyden and Christopher Merrill)
Pavlo Korobchuk
Alim Aliev
Kateryna Mikhalytsyna
Tetyana Teren
Yuri Andrukhovych
Marjana Savka
Lyuba Yakimchuk
Iryna Shuvalova

With more to come!

Askold Melnyczuk is the founding editor of AGNI and contributes a series of essays called “Shadowboxing.” He is professor of creative writing at UMass Boston. Excerpts from his anti-memoir in progress have appeared recently in The Threepenny Review and Epiphany. The Epiphany excerpt, “Turbulence, Love,” was cited as Notable in The Best American Essays 2010. His third novel, The House of Widows (Graywolf Press), won the Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 2008. His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2001) was called “exquisite, original” by The Washington Post, and his first, What Is Told (Faber and Faber), was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994.

In 1997 Melnyczuk received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York TimesThe NationThe Partisan ReviewGrand StreetPloughsharesAGNIPoetry, and The Boston Globe. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including The McGraw-Hill Book of PoetryLiterature: The Evolving Canon, and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He has edited three volumes in the Graywolf Take Three Poetry Series, as well as a volume of tributes to Father Daniel Berrigan and a livre d’artiste on painter Gerry Bergstein. He also coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine.

He previously taught at Harvard University, the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars, and Boston University, where he edited AGNI until its thirtieth anniversary year in 2002. A research associate of the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard, he has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and PEN New England and has been a fellow of the Boston Foundation. In 2001 he received PEN American Center’s biennial Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as well as PEN New England’s “Friend to Writers” Award.

Melnyczuk founded AGNI in 1972 as an undergraduate at Antioch College and Arrowsmith Press in 2006. (updated 10/2022)

See him interviewed on New England Authors.

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