Forbidden Love in Dark Times
May 23 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
The poet Derek Mong and translator Anne O. Fisher have long collaborated on projects that draw on their respective strengths. This year, they have released two independent books that are, in surprising, complex, rewarding ways, deeply resonant with each other. Fisher’s translation of a star-crossed gay romance set in the Soviet Union in 1986, Pioneer Summer — co-written by Ukrainian Katerina Sylvanova and Russian Elena Malisova — and Mong’s new collection of verse, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, both speak to the sustaining power and persistence of love in times of political repression and ecological disaster. In an event curated by Boris Dralyuk, Fisher and Mong will read from their work, discuss their collaboration, and touch on the state of poetry and translation in the US, Ukraine, and Russia. Co-presented by Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Magic City Books.
Magic City Books will have books by the authors available for purchase at the event. Eastern European desserts and tea will be served.
Street parking around Gitwit (301 E Archer St, Tulsa) is free after 5 PM on weekdays and all day on weekends. Seating for events is in an auditorium-style setting. Gitwit provides wheelchair accessibility to the first floor and restrooms. A lift is available for vertical access.
This event is free and open to the public.
REGISTER FOR FREE
About Derek Mong
Derek Mong is the author of three poetry collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes, The Identity Thief, and When the Earth Flies into the Sun (2024)—as well as a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. Individual poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Free Inquiry, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press). They also co-edit the literary journal, At Length. He currently chairs the English Department at Wabash College and serves as a contributing editor for Zócalo Public Square.
About Anne O. Fisher
Russian to English translator Anne O. Fisher’s recent publications include excerpts from Alex Averbuch’s long poem “The Last Letter of My Body” in Words Without Borders and Plume. Her most recent translated book, apart from the forthcoming Pioneer Summer, is Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary by Ukrainian writer, journalist, and historian Olena Stiazhkina (Harvard UP, 2024). Fisher has also translated books by Ksenia Buksha, Ilf and Petrov, and – together with her husband, poet Derek Mong – Maxim Amelin. Her shorter published translations include journalism by Shura Burtin, non-fiction by Sigizmund Krzhizhakovsky, drama and stories by Julia Lukshina, and fiction by Ilya Danishevsky. Fisher is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Fisher and her husband, poet Derek Mong, are the incoming co-editors of the literary journal At Length.
About Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and translator of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Leo Tolstoy, and other authors. He is the recipient of the 2024 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and of the 2020 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. He is the former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. He teaches courses in literature and creative writing at the University of Tulsa and is a 2024-2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee.
