This week, Esther Belin speaks with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Dasbach emigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. Her scholarly research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust, and pays particular attention to atrocities in the former Soviet territories. Her first book, The Many Names for Mother, hovers around intergenerational motherhood and trauma, while chronicling her travels, while pregnant, to death camp sites in Poland. She is also the author of Don't Touch the Bones and 40 WEEKS, which will be out next year. Dasbach reads, “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows,” from the September 2022 issue of Poetry, and shares how the poem originated from an interaction on the playground. You’ll also hear Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva and her translator, Amelia Glaser, reading at the Voices for Ukraine fundraiser and virtual reading series.

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