Slavic Voices: An Evening of Poetry and Music with Sylva Fischerova, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Vera Pavlova

  • Starts: 6:00 pm on Wednesday, October 15, 2014
  • Ends: 9:00 pm on Wednesday, October 15, 2014
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Sylva Fischerová (born 1963) is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes poetry with a vivid imagination as well as a historical reach. She has published eight volumes of poetry in Czech, and her poetry has been translated into numerous languages and is published widely. An earlier selection of her poems, The Tremor of Racehorses, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. In addition to poetry, she is the author of prose, children's literature and a "fictitious travelogue." The Swing in the Middle of Chaos: Selected Poems, co-translated with Stuart Friebert, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010. Stomach of the Soul is Fischerová's newest collection of poems in English translation and is translated by the author with Stuart Friebert and Andrew J. Hauner.

Pushcart-Prize winner Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of five poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Silvertone, and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, co-winner of the 2010 Sheila Motton Book Award. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as a Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classic in 2008. Dzvinia’s poetry and translations have appeared in numerous anthologies, including A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology; From Three Worlds: New Writing from the Ukraine; and A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry. Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of New York City based Four Way Books and she teaches as poetry faculty at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College and as Special Lecturer of Poetry and Creative Writing at Providence College. She is also the Editor of Poetry in Translation for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.

Vera Pavlova was born in Moscow and wrote her dissertation on the chamber vocal cycles of Shostakovich. Pavlova has published fifteen collections of poetry, four opera librettos, and lyrics to two cantatas. Her works have been translated twenty-one languages. In the United States, Pavlova’s poems have appeared in Verse, Tin House, The New Yorker, and Poetry magazines, as well as in The New York Times. One of her poems was selected by the Poetry in Motion program and was displayed as a poster in subway cars in New York City and in Los Angeles buses; it was also issued as a bookmark by the Poetry Society of America. That poem has served as the title of Pavlova’s first collection in English, If There Is Something to Desire (Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, 2010), translated by her husband Steven Seymour.

Live music will be provided by the Russian soprano Maria Lyudko, Russian pianist and music scholar Ludmilla Leibman, and classical guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan.

Free and open to the public. A reception and book-signing will follow the readings.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe, the 2014 Poetry Series, the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, the literary journal AGNI, and the Educational Bridge Project.

Location:
Boston University Castle, 225 Bay State Road

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