Presenters

Art, Poetry and Music: Ukraine: Sheltering in Place Reception

 

Luisa Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Ukraine and is the author of I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (Bridwell Press, 2025) When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Julia Kolchinsky, and American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). She is the winner of the 2017 Raz/ Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize and a member of the Cheburashka Collective. Additional work can be found at Best American Poetry, the Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and the Georgia Review among others.

 

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of five poetry collections, The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (University of Arkansas Press, 2025) and When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her recent awards include Hunger Mountain‘s Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, Michigan Quarterly Review’s Prize in Nonfiction, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

 

 

From Mariupol, Ukraine, pianist Olena Mladenova first studied at Donetsk Music Academy and continued at the UkrainianNational Tchaikovsky Academy of Music. She currently lives in Columbus and is a member of the Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio.

 

 

 

Secret Documents in Soviet Ukraine and the Making of The Face of Fire: A Conversation about History and Literature with Oleksii Nikitin

 

Oleksii Nikitin is a Russophone Ukrainian writer from Kyiv. He has won several awards for his novels: Istemi (2011), Mahjong (2012), Victory Park (2013), The Orderly from Institutska Street (2016), and, most recently, The Face of Fire (2021). The Face of Fire will come out in English translation by Catherine O’Neil and Dominique Hoffman in 2024.

Spring Baumer Lecture Series with Oleg Drozdov & Iryna Matsevko

 

Oleg Drozdov is the co-founder and president of the Kharkiv School of Architecture. The Kharkiv School of Architecture (KhSA) is the first private university in Ukraine to offer undergraduate (BA) and graduate (MA) degree opportunities in architecture and urbanism. Founded in 2017 to respond to the social transformations and the need to reinvent Ukrainian cities and to reform national higher education, the Kharkiv School has set its goal to equip its students with globally-informed and locally-relevant knowledge to improve the quality of urban life. In addition to serving as president of KhSA, Drozdov founded the award-winning architectural office Drozdov&Partners in 1997. Since 2022, he has been a European Commission expert and co-founder of Ro3Kvit: urban coalition for Ukraine.

Iryna Matsevko is the deputy vice-chancellor and a professor at the KharkivSchool of Architecture. Her professional experience encompasses various formats of public history: developing and coordinating a series of public lectures; organizing discussions and exhibition programs in Lviv and Kharkiv; engaging wide audiences in dialogue about the multicultural pasts of cities in Ukraine and Eastern Europe; developing new heritage tools for varying professional audiences; team member of the Synagogue Space Commemorative Project in Lviv, Ukraine; and coordinator of the three-year project “ReHERIT: Common Responsibility for Shared Heritage”. In 2021, she was a co-designer of signs for cultural heritage sites in Uman, Ukraine, and editor of “Uman. (Un)known Stories of the City”, a collection of texts about Uman’s past, memory, and heritage.