On October 26, 5-6 pm at Manny’s in San Francisco, Punctured Lines will be hosting an event as a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl. Please join us if you’re able and help spread the word!
We’re a group of immigrant writers with roots in the former Soviet Union coming together to share writing about our home countries, immigrant communities, complicated identities, and more. War continues to shape our stories, and so does food, nature, parenthood, and love. Passionately told, these stories nourish our communal resilience.
The title of our event comes from a quote from a notable writer and thinker, Svetlana Boym, who wrote that “passionate thinking contains both adventure and humility, and a combination of thinking and thanking (life, being, existence).” We agree with her that this approach to literature and life may be particularly suited for our times ravaged by war, globalization, and social media bubbles. We are here to listen and support each other’s quest for connection and meaning.
Writers bios:
Karolina Letunova grew up in Western Siberia. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Threepenny Review. She is a 2023-2024 California Arts Council Artist Fellow. Her novel-in-progress has been supported by The de Groot Foundation, Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe, Storyknife, Ragdale, VCCA, and Monson Arts.
Maggie Levantovskaya is a writer and Teaching Professor in the English department at Santa Clara University. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in San Francisco. Her creative nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Longreads, Catapult, the LA Times, Current Affairs, and Lithub.
Leningrad-born Margarita Meklina now faces the situation when her current publisher, NLO, is afraid to print her work due to the expanded anti-LGBTQ laws. Her earlier book, written in collaboration with Lida Yusupova, LOVE HAS FOUR HANDS, was removed from Russian bookstores due to the tightening grip of Putin’s regime.
Yuliya Patsay is a Soviet-born, San Francisco-raised, teller of stories – most of which are at least half true.
She loves rolling fog, dim sum, and a receptive audience. She lives in “Little Russia” with her husband, two kids, and enough mishpuha close by to keep her wildly entertained!
Nina Rodenko is the winner of the 2022 Clark-Gross Scholarship Award for her debut novel, The United Selves of Veronica, which is currently in its final draft. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Bookstr, Prometheus Dreaming, and Watershed Review. Born in Ukraine, Nina now lives in San Francisco.
Tatyana Sundeyeva is a writer originally from Moldova. She has published short fiction and essays in Fractured Literary, Oyster River Pages, Cleaver, and Hadassah Magazine. Her story about the civil war in Moldova was nominated for Best Microfiction 2023. You can find her at Tatyanawrites.com.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), that will also come out in Italy, France, Germany, Finland, Israel, and Brazil. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, KQED, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.
Olga Zilberbourg’s LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times and deals with bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Zilberbourg co-moderates the San Francisco Writers Workshop and is a co-founder of Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on the literatures of the former USSR.
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