Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnipro, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, which pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart, a virtual poetry reading series born out of pandemic but meant to outlast it. Julia's newest collection, 40 WEEKS is now available through YesYes Books. She is also the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is available from Lost Horse Press and perhaps your local book store. You can find her poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She is Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in Creative Writing at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her family.

Find much more at:

https://www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com/

As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.

For links to all the past episodes, visit:

https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/

This Week’s Prompt:

Write an ekphrastic poem about a recent image in your camera roll.

Next Week's Prompt:

Use an object as metaphor for some aspect of the body, as Julia does with fruit in 40 Weeks. Write a poem using colons to create a string of similes, as she does throughout the book.

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