Situating herself in the contexts of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Ukrainian diaspora, Sonya Bilocerkowycz presents the roles and responsibilities of the reader, writer and artist in wartime. Bilocerkowycz emphasises the power writers have in influencing memory and narrative through their work in such times, and calls for the writer not only to prepare, learn, and inform, but to also use art to defend and save lives when the moment comes.

Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a Ukrainian-American writer and artist from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She is the author of On Our Way Home from the Revolution (Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books, 2019), selected by David Lazar and Patrick Madden as winner of the Gournay Prize for a debut essay collection. Sonya's work has appeared in Guernica, Ninth Letter, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorado Review, The Normal School, and in the anthology Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, edited by Brandon Stosuy (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Before completing her MFA at Ohio State, she served as a Fulbright Fellow in Belarus, an educational recruiter in the Republic of Georgia, and an instructor at Ukrainian Catholic University in L'viv. Currently, Sonya is the Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo in western New York. She has been named a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and is at work on a second book.