SPRING 2025

Psoy Korolenko and Polina Shepherd. "The Stranniki in New York." Concert
January 28, 7 pm

"Pkhentz"! A book launch and reading by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky
February 6, 6:30 pm 

"Letters of Freedom" to Political Prisoners in Russia 
February 18, 7 pm

Benjamin Nathans. "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause." Book Talk 
February 27, 6:30 pm

Queendom. A Film Screening and Discussion 
March 6, 6:30 pm

Victoria Lomasko. The Last Soviet Artist 
March 17, 6:30 pm

Martin Nekola. "Cold War Czechoslovakia and Exiles in the U.S." Lecture 
​March 27, 6:30 pm

Semyon Khanin. A reading and discussion on poetry, urban art, and publishing 
​March 31, 6:30 pm

Modernist and Experimental Literature from Kharkiv in Translation
April 21, 6:30 pm

Narine Abgaryan. To Go On Living 
​April 23, 6:30 pm 
Psoy Korolenko and Polina Shepherd. The Stranniki. Concert. Tuesday, January 28, 7 pm. Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by Tamizdat Project and CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. RSVP required. 

The Stranniki is a collaborative project of Polina Shepherd and Psoy Korolenko, two multilingual, cross-genre artists and authors, prominent in the Yiddish music scene for over two decades. Soon after their initial mini-tour and presentation at the conference “Mediating a New Cold War in the Digital Age” at Dartmouth College (2016), the duo embarked on a cross-US tour, followed by more international concerts. Central to their repertoire is the concept of a wanderer, and the associated archetype of “road/path.” The Stranniki draw upon, feature, and fuse elements of poetry and songs from Yiddish and Russian literature, folklore, and popular culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, organically weaving in their own original material. Their first mutual album unveils a distinctive continuity of texts, melodies, paths, and destinies, inspiring and informing in the peculiar 2020s as much as it ever has - if not more so.

Polina Shepherd is a Siberian-born, UK-based composer, singer, choir leader and educator, specializing in Yiddish and Russian music. Her unique style blends East European Jewish, Slavic and Turkic influences. She has collaborated with her husband, klezmer clarinetist and band leader Merlin Shepherd, Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and Psoy Korolenko, among others. She has served as program director for many festivals, including the large pandemic-time online project Step Forverts, featuring over 50 artists from around the world. She also co-produced Undzer Yiddishkayt, a collection of new songs by Eurasian klezmer artists. Polina is the artistic director of the Caravan Orchestra, a German-Israeli/Palestinian youth collaboration. Her work spans choral direction, improvisation and theatre, advancing Jewish music worldwide.

Psoy Korolenko (Pavel Lion) is a multilingual singer-songwriter, translator, journalist and scholar, currently a Visiting Lecturer at Dartmouth College. He is a former scholar/artist-in-residence at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Dickinson College. He has released numerous albums, both solo and in collaboration, as well as several books of essays, lyrics and translations. His style blends Soviet urban folk, guitar poetry, Yiddish theater songs, French chanson, Tropicalia and more. A Recording Academy voting member, Psoy co-organizes the international festival of music and arts JetLAG in NY state and co-created the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory, a project reviving lost WWII-era Yiddish songs from Ukraine in collaboration with the historian Anna Shternshis, Professor of Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Address & directions: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Elebash Recitall Hall is located on the first floor of the CUNY Graduate Center, to the left past the security desk. 
Picture
Photo by Keith Wolzinger
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PKHENTZ! A Book Launch and Reading by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky. Thursday, February 6, 6:30 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Building). Free and open to the public (please bring a state ID to enter the building). RSVP required. 

Please join us for the NYC launch of Tamizdat Project's first book and a bilingual reading of Abram Tertz's PKHENTZ by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky! 

This iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation relates the miseries of a mid-level Soviet accountant—pseudonym Andrei Sushinsky—who is actually an outer-space alien. A classic misunderstood hero, he struggles daily to keep himself alive (his cactus-like body requires abundant water and has been debilitated by years of concealment) and to avoid the constant threat of exposure. Repulsed by the gross physiology and petty concerns of his Soviet neighbors and fellow-citizens, Sushinsky dreams of reuniting with his lost planet and treasures the faint traces of it that remain: scraps of his long-lost language (hence the title word PKHENTZ, a barely remembered sacred name) and his own extravagantly nonhuman body. Meanwhile, years of life among humans and concerted efforts to assimilate have worn Sushinsky down and caused him to question his sense of reality and existence overall.

​Written in 1957, the story was first published in the West in the wake of the infamous Moscow show trial of 1966, when two Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Tertz) and Yuly Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak) were sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years of hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works abroad. While ostensibly addressing the experience of living with various covert identities in the mid-century Soviet Union (Jewish, dissident, political prisoner), the story’s subsequent wanderings broaden its purview to include refugee, émigré and queer experience. This inaugural publication presents the story for the first time as a freestanding edition and in a new English translation.

Ainsley Morse is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature from the former USSR and its many republics, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as the former Yugoslavia and present day Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. She is the author of Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (2021) and a translator from Russian, B/C/S and Ukrainian. Her co-translated volume Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film (by Yuri Tynianov) won the 2021 AATSEEL Best Scholarly Translation award. She is also a coeditor (with Anastasia Osipova) at Cicada Press, a small independent publisher of translated poetry.  

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet, translator and professor at NYU. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, were published in the NYRB Poets series. His translations include Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think and The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, among others. 

Address & directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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"Letters of Freedom" to Political Prisoners in Russia. Tuesday, February 18, 7 pm. Chanin Language Center (room B126, Hunter West). Free and open to the public (with a state-issued ID). RSVP required. 

Join us for an event dedicated to writing letters to political prisoners in Russia, including Russian, Ukrainian and other nationals! Organized in memory of Alexei Navalny, a symbol of political opposition to Putin's regime, who was murdered in prison a year ago, on February 16, 2023, it will feature portraits of seriously ill political prisoners whose lives are now in danger. With more than 200 cards of political prisoners, you will be able to choose your addressee(s) - and, logistics permitting, receive an answer from them in the following months. All personal cards and other materials are derived from the Memorial Society and OVD Info databases. No knowledge of Russian is required: our volunteers will help with translating your letters into Russian and delivering them to political prisoners. 

We want to let those behind bars know that they are not forgotten! Your letters will be a breath of free air, a lifeline connecting prisoners under harsh and often inhumane circumstances to the outside world.. 

- Everyone is welcome 
- All materials will be provided
- Donations for postage are welcome but not required 
- Letters can be written in paper or electronic form. If you want to write a letter online, please bring your phone, tablet or laptop!  

Our special guest will be Ivan Lopukhin, a graduate of Moscow State University with a degree in Sociology, who worked for over 10 years in district election commissions in Moscow and volunteered as an observer. Since 2013, Ivan has actively participated in anti-corruption and socio-political projects of Alexei Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ivan, together with his family, was forced to leave Russia and moved to New York. In April 2023, he, along with like-minded activists, founded the community of supporters of Alexei Navalny, #FreeNavalny_NY. The group organizes public rallies calling for the release of political prisoners and against the war. They also organize events to write letters to political prisoners called "Letters of Freedom." After Navalny's assassination, the group changed its name to TeamNavalny_NY and was successful in installing a memorial plaque in honor of Alexei Navalny in Central Park. They also gathered support and collected signatures to rename 91st Street near the Russian Consulate in his honor.

Address & directions: Hunter College is located at East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue (6 train). At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around, and look for room B126 - Chanin Language Center on your right. 
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Benjamin Nathans. "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement." Book Talk. Thursday, February 27, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

Benjamin Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Vucinich Book Prize, and the Lincoln Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Queendom by Agniia Galdanova (2024 | 98 min). A Film Screening and Discussion. Thursday, March 6, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Co-hosted by RUSA LGBTQ+. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

In defiance of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, Jenna (she/her, non-binary), a queer artist from a small town in Russia, dresses in otherworldly costumes made from junk and tape, and protests the government on the streets of Moscow.Born and raised on the harsh streets of Magadan, a frigid outpost of the Soviet gulag, Jenna is only 21. She stages radical performances in public that become a new form of art and activism. By doing that, she wants to change people’s perception of beauty and queerness and bring attention to the harassment of the LGBTQ+ community. The performances – often dark, strange, evocative, and queer at their core – are a manifestation of Jenna’s subconscious. But they come at a price.

The event is co-hosted by RUSA LGBTQ+, a NYC community-based nonprofit organization of Eurasian LGBTQ+ people, women, and others with intersectional identities and their allies. 

Igor Myakotin is an Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning filmmaker who produced the feature-length documentary Queendom (2023), which had its world premiere at SXSW 2023 and won the NEXT:WAVE Jury Award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Igor also co-produced Welcome to Chechnya (2020), which HBO acquired before its world premiere in a 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary competition. Welcome to Chechnya has also been awarded the Peabody Award and BAFTA and received an Emmy nomination. Igor is a 2022 Sundance Producing Fellow and was named as one of the “40 Under 40” working in the documentary industry by DOC NYC. He believes that cinema is not a way to escape reality but a way to embrace it with all its peculiarities and its darkness.

Roman Utkin is an associate professor at Wesleyan University. He specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture and is the author of Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). Roman is currently at work on his next book, Queer Russia: Genealogies of Difference from the Silver Age to Perestroika. A native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, Roman has served on the board of the Committee on Advocacy for Diversity and Inclusion within the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also a founding member of Q*ASEEES, the Society for the Promotion of LGBTQ Studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Roman was educated in Russia and the United States, earning an undergraduate degree in philology at Kazan State University and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University. 

Yaya Simakov is a Russian-American screenwriter and director. She is an assistant professor of film studies at Wesleyan University. Yaya's directing debut, Keep It Quiet, won Best Live Action Short at the Warsaw Film Festival (Oscar-qualifying), was nominated for Best U.S. Short at the Palm Springs ShortFest, and selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick after its online premiere on Short of the Week and Directors' Library. Yaya has a background in lighting and cinematography and experience in producing and editing. Currently, Yaya is finishing post-production on a new short film, co-produced with Stereotactic. 

Maxim Ibadov is a Brooklyn-born, Moscow-raised activist, events producer, performing artist, and educator. Maxim’s advocacy and activism go back to 2012, when they were a middle schooler in Russia protesting against corruption and bigotry. They moved to the United States that same year and pursued a career in performing arts, graduating from Baruch College with a double degree in English and Arts Administration in Theatre. During the pandemic, Maxim has shifted from theater to nightlife, producing community-focused events that celebrate the LGBTQIA community and raise awareness about issues ranging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to transgender rights and racial justice. This has led to Maxim becoming the first coordinator for RUSA LGBTQ, where they oversee in-person events, manage media and other inquiries, lead a team of volunteers, and do other tasks. In addition to RUSA, Maxim also teaches theater to elementary and middle school students in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Victoria Lomasko. The Last Soviet Artist. A book talk and a screening of Tree of Violence (2024 | 81 min), a documentary by Anna Moiseenko. Monday, March 17, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by N+1. 

Join us for a conversation with Victoria Lomasko, author of The Last Soviet Artist, and a screening of the documentary Tree of Violence, which features her work and career! 

​The Last Soviet Artist is a collection of graphic reportages by Victoria Lomasko, published by N+1 (New York, 2025). The book was created during trips across the former Soviet republics. The first part describes society in Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia and the North Caucasus: gender rights, grassroots initiatives, fragments of the Soviet heritage and new trends. The book’s second part focuses on the Belarusian Revolution of 2020-2021, and the last major protests in Russia on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine: what happens to the lives of ordinary people in times of historical change. The third part was written already in exile. All three parts are united by the main subject: generational conflict in the post-Soviet space. The book won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême.

Tree of Violence (2024 | 81 min), a documentary by Anna Moiseenko, portrays the internationally recognized graphic journalist Victoria (Vika) Lomasko as she exposes truths about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Her ambitious new work on the long reach of state-sponsored violence—from domestic violence to the crackdown on free speech—is timely. As Putin wages a war against Ukraine and brands dissidents as "traitors, to spit out like flies," Vika faces increasing safety threats and must decide if a future in Russia is possible.

Victoria Lomasko’s (b. 1978) practice of graphic reportage synthesizes image and text, taking the form of novels, journalism, comics, paintings and monumental murals. A renowned dissident voice in the highly censored environment of contemporary Russia, Lomasko’s seminal graphic novels, including Other Russias and Forbidden Art, have an honest style exposing the country’s inequalities and injustices whilst amplifying and defending the plight of Russia’s many voiceless and unseen communities. Travelling across Russia and the neighboring countries, often at great personal risk, her work embraces a magical realist sensibility as a method of processing subjective and visceral experiences. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Martin Nekola. "Cold War Czechoslovakia and Exiles in the U.S." Lecture. Thursday, March 27, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in May 1945, and was soon subjected to sovietization and the rising dominance of the Communist regime, which lasted for more than four decades, after the complete takeover in February, 1948. Thousands of Czechs and Slovaks (up to 300 000 in 1948-1989), who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, left. First, they found themselves in the so-called displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, where their first periodicals were published and the first seeds of political activity were planted. Almost seven dozen newspapers, magazines and newsletters, and nearly two hundred Czech institutions, including political organizations, parties, academic clubs or thinktanks, operated in the free world after 1948, above all in the U.S. But despite such a promising start and international support, the Council of Free Czechoslovakia, established in Washington D.C. as an umbrella organization for this community of exiles, writhed in crisis and fell apart, until it revived years later. As time passed, the atmosphere in exile changed, bringing new topics, new challenges, and new leaders. Dr. Nekola will discuss these and other aspects of the Czechoslovak Cold War exile, with a focus on the American context.

Martin Nekola holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Charles University in Prague. His research is on non-democratic regimes, the era of Communism, Czech communities abroad and the East-European anti-communist exiles in the U.S. during the Cold War. From time to time, he participates in the election observation missions organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and author of more than three hundred articles and dozens of book-length projects. He is also the coordinator of the Czechoslovak Talks Project.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Semyon Khanin. A reading and discussion on poetry, urban art, and publishing . Monday, March 31, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Please join us for a poetry reading and conversation with Semyon Khanin, a Riga-based poet, translator, and editor, author of several books, including Tol'ko chto (2003), Opushchennye podrobnosti (2008), Vplav' (2013), A vam ne kazhetsa, chto eti vashi p'at' minut kak-to slishkom sil'no zat'anulis' (2015), No ne tem (selected poems, 2017), Posignal' (2019), and Dve vtoryh (2023). Khanin’s collections of poetry have appeared in most European languages. He is also a translator of Latvian and American poetry into Russian, and editor of several books of Russian and Latvian poets, e.g., the anthology Latvian/Russian Poetry. Poems in Russian Written by Latvian Poets (2011). Khanin is the founding member of the multimedia poetry project Orbita, a creative collective of poets and visual artists whose works features a dialogue between various cultures and genres (including literature, music, video, and photography, among others). He is the author of performances and installations One Face Theatre, Three-Dimensional Poetry etc.
 
Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Modernist and Experimental Literature from Kharkiv in Translation. A reading and Q&A with Eugene Ostashevsky, Ekaterina Derysheva, and Ian Ross Singleton. Monday, April 21, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Ian Ross Singleton and Eugene Ostashevsky will read translations of Ukrainian modernists connected to Kharkiv: Mykhail Semenko, the founder of Ukrainian Futurism; Yurii Yanovsky, the author of The Shipwright (Майстер корабля), а 1920s novel about the Ukrainian film industry; and Maik Iohansen, modernist poet and fiction writer. They will be joined by the Kharkiv poet Ekaterina Derysheva, currently at U Penn, who will share her own work.

Ekaterina Derysheva is a displaced poet from Kharkiv, born in 1994 in Melitopol, Ukraine. Her poems have been published in journals such as Poem-a-Day series, Asymptote, Buenos Aires Poetry, Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Wizje, Volga, and others. She is the author of the books "Starting Point" (2018) and "There Will Be No Installation" (2023), and co-author of the book "Earth Time" (Romania, 2020). Her poems have been translated into 11 languages. She has received fellowships from Villa Concordia, LCB, Next Page Foundation, Artist Protection Fund Fellowship in residence at University of Pennsylvania.

Ian Ross Singleton is a writer and translator from the Russian and Ukrainian languages. He teaches Writing and Critical Inquiry at SUNY Albany and is Nonfiction Editor of Asymptote. His debut novel Two Big Differences, about the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, came out in 2021 from MGraphics Press. He is currently undertaking a translation of The Shipbuilder by Yuri Yanovsky for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. His books of poetry include The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, and The Feeling Sonnets (both published by NYRB Poets). He will be reading his translations of the Ukrainian Futurist Mykhail Semenko.
 
Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Narine Abgaryan. To Go on Living. A book talk and bilingual reading, followed by a conversation with the author and translator Margarit Ordukhanyan. Wednesday, April 23, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Set in an Armenian mountain village immediately after the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s, Abgaryan's To Go On Living traces the interconnected lives of villagers tending to their everyday tasks, engaging in quotidian squabbles, and celebrating small joys against a breathtaking landscape. Yet the setting, suspended in time and space, belies unspeakable tragedy: every character contends with an unbearable burden of loss. The war rages largely off the book’s pages, appearing only in fragmented flashbacks. Abgaryan’s stories focus on how, in the war’s aftermath, the survivors work, as individuals and as a community, to find a way forward. Written in Abgaryan’s signature style that weaves elements of Armenian folk tradition into her prose, these stories of community, courage, and resilience celebrate human life, where humor and love and hope prevail in unthinkable circumstances.

Narine Abgaryan was born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, to a doctor and a school teacher. Named one of Europe’s most exciting authors by the Guardian, she is the author of a dozen books, which have collectively sold over 1.35 million copies. Her book Three Apples Fell From the Sky (Oneworld, 2020) won the Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award and an English PEN Award, and has been translated into 27 languages. Her award-winning trilogy about Manunia, a busy and troublesome 11-year-old, has been made into a TV series. Abgaryan divides her time between Armenia and Germany.

Margarit Ordukhanyan is a New York-based scholar and translator of poetry and prose from her native Armenian and Russian into English. Ordukhanyan was the Fall 2022 Translator-in-Residence at the University of Iowa’s Translation Workshop and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellow. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at the New York Public Library.
 
Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: [email protected]