Poet reflects on her family’s flight from persecution

The UO’s Creative Writing Program presents a virtual poetry reading by UO alumna Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach on Wednesday, January 26, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. Creative Writing’s Reading Series is cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993 when she was six. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon in 2013 and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry,” attends to the under-recorded and under-represented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is a Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College.

According to UO professor Garrett Hongo, Don’t Touch the Bones (2020), Dasbach’s second collection, “works to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed micro-histories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora. Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination.” Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize.

Her first collection The Many Names for Mother (2019) is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This collection explores history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union, to Dasbach’s travels while pregnant with her son, to death-camp sites in Poland. The collection won the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards.

Her newest collection, 40 WEEKS, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2022. Her recent poems can be found in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others.

Dasbach’s reading is free and open to the public. Register at crwr.uoregon.edu

The Creative Writing Reading Series will also include a fiction writer in winter term who will be announced at a later date.