Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl festival and will take place at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025 at 5 pm.
We’re a group of immigrant writers and translators from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, coming together to share creative ways of speaking truth to power. Our fiction and non-fiction stems from our community’s memories of life under the USSR’s totalitarian regime and from our response to Russia’s authoritarian tactics of censorship and war. As artists working in the United States today, the growing threat to freedom of expression in this country is shocking in its familiarity. We have seen – and lived – all this before. This is why we believe it’s essential now to provide space to each other’s voices, to build our resilience to censorship and the self-censorship that often follows.
Book Sales provided by Globus Books.
Featured writers:
Evgeniya Dame is a former Stegner Fellow whose fiction and non-fiction have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received support from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Monson Arts. Evgeniya holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She is the Associate Editor at The Threepenny Review and lives in Berkeley.
Elana Gomel was born in Ukraine and currently resides in California. Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known in the academy for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory, including books such as Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism and The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. A member of Horror Writers of America (HWA), she is the author of many short stories, two collections, several novellas, and eight novels of dark fantasy and science fiction. Her stories appeared in Best Horror of the Year, The Dark magazine, Apex, and many anthologies. Her latest novels are Nightwood, a fairy tale about exile, marriage, and monsters (Silver Award in the Bookfest 2023 contest) and Nine Levels, a mythological fantasy.
Dmitri Manin‘s poetry translations from Russian to English have been published in books and journals. His translation of Nikolay Zabolotsky’s collection Columns (Arc Publications, 2023) was shortlisted for the ALTA First Translation Prize and the Northern California Book Awards. His translation of a poem by Gala Pushkarenko, first published in AzonaL, was selected for the Best Literary Translations anthology (Deep Vellum, 2024) He translated a number of poems for two anthologies of Russian anti-war poetry, Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2023) and Dislocation (Slavica, 2024).
Maggie Levantovskaya was born in Ukraine and grew up in San Francisco. She works as a Teaching Professor in the English department at Santa Clara University in California. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Current Affairs, The Rumpus, Lithub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Longreads, and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a memoir about lupus.
Margarita Meklina is a bilingual author born in Leningrad, USSR. She came to the US as a refugee in the early 1990s. The winner of several prestigious international literary prizes, Meklina saw her books vanish from bookshelves and her publishing contracts in Russia evaporate due to her positioning as a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights. With Anne Fisher, she co-curated “Life Stories, Death Sentences,” a folio of LGBTQ+ literature translated from Russian and, together with The Brooklyn Rail/In Translation, facilitated a multilingual reading in New York city, to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Her new chapbook printed in Berlin uses in its title a Yiddish word and the Jewish “lucky number” 18: 18 Shticks.
Mirgul Kali’s translations of short stories by classic and contemporary Kazakh writers have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, Words Without Borders, and other publications. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a PEN Translates award for her translation of Baqytgul Sarmekova’s To Hell with Poets, a short story collection published by Tilted Axis Press in March 2024. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY (Bloomsbury, 2024), which is a finalist for the California Book Award and is translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, USA Today, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13.
Yuliya Ilchuk is Associate Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. She is the author of an award-winning book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity, and a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, including Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, co-translated with Amelia Glaser. Ilchuk’s book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits collective memory and trauma, post-memory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation in Ukraine. In 2025, HURI Books published Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters by Iya Kiva that Ilchuk co-translated with Glaser.
Yuliya Patsay is a Soviet-born, San Francisco-raised teller of stories, most of which are at least half true. On any given day you can find her in a padded room talking to herself (some people call this voice acting), driving carpool, or on the prowl for an unattended microphone and a captive audience. Her motto is “if you’re not laughing, you’re crying.”
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and four Russian-language story collections. She has published fiction and essays in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Her translation from the work of a Kyiv-based poet and writer Olga Bragina is forthcoming from Fence and Best Literary Translations 2026 from Deep Vellum Press. She co-edits Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
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