Echoes of Empire: Literary Dissent in the Post-Soviet World

press release: 

(Refreshments starting at 3:45) Room 206, Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive

Speaker: Katherine E. Young, translator and poet

Sponsored by CREECA and UW-Madison English Department

About the talk: Katherine E. Young explores the role of the contemporary writer as truth teller in the diverse linguistic, gender, political, and sociocultural contexts of Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and the digital universe beyond.

About the speaker: Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist; she currently serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, VA. Young is also the translator of Two Poems by Inna Kabysh; her translations of Russian poets Xenia Emelyanova and Inna Kabysh won prizes in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender competitions of 2014 and 2011, respectively. A full-length collection of Inna Kabysh’s poems was a finalist for the 2016 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Young’s translations of Russophone writers appear in Notre Dame Review, The White Review, Words without Borders, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, 100 стихотворений о Москве: Антология (100 Poems about Moscow: an Anthology), and many others. Several translations have been made into short films. Young was awarded a 2017 Fellowship in Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts for her translations of Azeri novelist and political prisoner Akram Aylisli.