Reading for Ukraine
3/21 7 pm Eastern
Readings from Kaveh Akbar, Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky, Kiese Laymon and Valzhyna Mort. New ticketing site up soon check back !
“We don’t know when this nightmare will end but poetry programming is a great idea to show the war that we are not afraid of it.” - Oleg Suslov, Editor-in-Chief, Evening Odesa newspaper
“We started this Poetry Studio in the summer of 2023 in Odesa, Ukraine. Our first young poet was the child of war refugees. Since then, young poets from all over the city and beyond have joined. Some groups are as small as five, while others have 25 or more. Some kids are very young, while others are high schoolers.
War presents many challenges: every meeting depends whether or not the area had been bombed the night before. If there is a an attack, parents might not let their kids out. The meeting location might change. But we are committed to making these meetings happen. To ensure their poems aren’t solely focused on trauma, we take kids around Odesa for inspiration: they visit the local zoo, the legendary Odesa film studios, the old town, and parks. Kids share poetry at these locations.
In just one year, we’ve already expanded our programming: we now run an ongoing free poetry competition and annual kids’ poetry festival called New Odyssey. We have started the New Odyssey Almanac of poetry written by kids. We also run features on young poets in the Evening Odesa, a popular, city-wide newspaper.”
— the founders, via poemsnotbombs.org