Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War

Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her new novel, Mother Doll, was named a Best Book of 2024 by Vogue. Her debut, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed and others and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Katya translated poetry and prose from Russian for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has done residencies at VCCA, Ucross, Art Omi, Jan Michalski Foundation, and Playa, and received an Elizabeth George grant. Born in Moscow, raised in Boston, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.

Yelena Furman was born in what is now Kyiv, Ukraine and lives in Los Angeles. She teaches in the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, and her research and publications, in various academic venues, focus on literature by contemporary Soviet-Jewish immigrants in the United States. She regularly reviews translated fiction and academic monographs, with reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, On the Seawall, the Times Literary Supplement, and others. Her fiction has been published in Narrative, The Willesden Herald, and Roi Fainéant, and she is currently at work on her first short-story collection featuring Soviet-Jewish immigrants and lots of references to Russian literature. She and Olga Zilberbourg co-run Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on the literatures of post-Soviet diasporas.

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry was born in Armenia and raised in Soviet Russia. She’s published over fifty stories and received eleven Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as four special mentions in the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. Kristina is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, long-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize and was picked by the New York Post as one of the best books of the year. It has been translated into many languages.

Julia Kolchinsky, PhD, writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the  author of The Many Names for Mother (Wick Poetry Prize, KSU Press, 2019); Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020); 40 Weeks (Yes Yes Book, 2023), and Parallax (UAP, 2025). She is assistant professor of English at Denison University.

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the United States as a child. She is the author of the novels Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University, where she is also the fiction editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

Olga Livshin grew up in Ukraine and Russia, and came to the US as a teenager. Her poetry, essays, translations and interviews recently appear in POETRY magazine, New York Times, Ploughshares, and The Rumpus. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of the immigrant Russian poet Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from marginalized, conflict-affected communities and collectives across the world.

Ruth Madievsky is the author of the national bestselling novel, All-Night Pharmacy, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. An Indie Next Pick, All-Night Pharmacy was hailed by the New York Times as “tender and hilarious” and was named a Best/Most Anticipated 2023 Book by over 45 venues, including NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Vulture, and Buzzfeed. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a clinical pharmacist.

Ainsley Morse teaches literature and translation at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and the languages of the former Yugoslavia.

Luisa Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Ukraine, and holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Houston. She is the author of I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (Bridwell Press, 2025) and American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Winner of a 2024 California Press Women Communications Award and MIT-trained mother of two, Jane Yevgenia Muschenetz arrived in the US as a Jewish child refugee from Soviet Ukraine. She has appeared on KPBS Midday Edition, Spoken Word Paris, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Her short poetry collections, POWER POINT (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024) and All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023), center belonging and hope in the face of difficult realities. Connect with Jane at www.PalmFrondZoo.com.

Asya Partan is a Boston-based writer whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, Pangyrus, NPR’s Cognoscenti, Design Museum Magazine, Harvard Innovation Labs’ venture stories, WBUR, and numerous arts and culture blogs. Born in Moscow, Russia, Asya moved to the US in 1990. She holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics, and – after a career pivot – is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College while working on a memoir.

Irina Reyn is the author of three novels: Mother Country, The Imperial Wife, and What Happened to Anna K, which won the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction. Her work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other publications. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Diana Ruzova was born in Minsk, Belarus and raised in Los Angeles. She has an MFA in literature and creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. In summer 2024, she was a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Fellow. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, LAist, BOMB, Flaunt, Hyperallergic, Oprah Daily, New York Magazine’s The Cut, and other publications. She is at work on a memoir about growing up in Los Angeles as an apartment manager’s daughter.

Timmy Straw is from Oregon. Their first book, The Thomas Salto, was published last year by Fonograf Editions, and their poems appear in Annulet, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and the Yale Review. With Ainsley Morse, they’re working on translations of the Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.

An educator and writer born in Moldova, Vlada Teper is a former Fulbright Scholar in Russia. Her essays and poetry have been featured in Newsweek, NPR, World Literature Today, Oberon, and others. She is the founder of Inspiring Multicultural Understanding (I M U) leadership programs for teens and the recipient of the Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia Teacher of the Month Award. Her completed memoir is about falling for a Buddist monk while being an accidental Sex Ed substitute. You can learn more at www.vladateper.com.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Telegraph, KQED, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13.

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores bicultural identity, bisexuality, and immigrant parenthood. Born in Leningrad, USSR, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she lives in California where she co-facilitates the San Francisco Writers Workshop and, together with Yelena Furman, runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literatures from the former USSR. She is at work on her first novel.