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.
Continue reading “Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out”Thanks to those of you who could attend our event, Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War, hosted by the Wende Museum on March 28. We loved having you as our audience and hope to continue the conversations in various ways.
Thank you for donating to Ukraine Trust Chain. Ukraine needs all of our support. Please continue to spread the word and donate here: https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/
The video from our event is now online:
Continue reading “Video from Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War”
This one of a kind reading brings together Soviet-born writers as they weave together an intricate story of identity, memory, cultural intersections, immigration, and war. From fiction to poetry, memoir and journalism, and work in translation, the reading presents a deep dive into the individual and collective experiences of the Soviet-born diaspora in the U.S. This free event includes a fundraiser in support of humanitarian aid in Ukraine and aligns with The Wende Museum’s current exhibition “Undercurrents II: Archives and the Making of Soviet Jewish Identity.” Autographed books will be on sale, courtesy of Village Well.
Hosted by The Wende Museum, readers include poets, writers, and translators: Katya Apekina, Yelena Furman, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, Julia Kolchinsky, Arina Kole, Maria Kuznetsova, Olga Livshin, Ruth Madievsky, Ainsley Morse, Luisa Muradyan, Jane Muschenetz, Asya Partan, Irina Reyn, Diana Ruzova, Timmy Straw, Vlada Teper, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Olga Zilberbourg.
Continue reading “Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War”
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!
Continue reading “Passionate Thinking in Diaspora with Writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova”A new novel set in World War II enters a crowded and hotly contested field. It is a particularly remarkable feat for a debut novelist that Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) earned universal praise from celebrated writers across the former USSR diaspora community and far beyond. Gary Shteyngart wrote, “Wonderfully written, elegiac and necessary, Sasha Vasilyuk uncovers the history behind the recent headlines with great skill and grace.” Susanne Pari, author of In the Time of Our History and The Fortune Catcher, wrote, “An outstanding novel of sacrifice, love, and forgiveness.”
We celebrate this novel’s arrival with particular pleasure. A contributor to Punctured Lines, Vasilyuk participated in a number of events we’ve hosted over the years, and we’ve heard excerpts from this novel as she was working on one draft after another. In May 2024, Olga Zilberbourg interviewed Vasilyuk during a book release event at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco. The following Q&A is a follow-up to that in-person conversation.
Continue reading “A Character with a Secret Is an Easy Sell: A Conversation with Sasha Vasilyuk, by Olga Zilberbourg”San Francisco Bay Area readers, take note: for the second year in a row, Punctured Lines is producing an event during San Francisco’s Lit Crawl.
On Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia, a group of Bay Area authors will come together with poetry, stories and essays centered on Ukraine. Several of these authors have been regulars on our blog, and we’re delighted to introduce a few new names to our line up from last year.
Continue reading “Punctured Lines Authors at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl”Update: there has been a venue change. This event is now happening at Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street.
Punctured Lines is co-hosting a Lit Crawl reading by six Bay Area writers born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova. Shaken by the horrific tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we will read pieces exploring our connections, direct and indirect, to the part of the world we associate with home and exile, and where many of our friends and relatives are suffering as a result of the war. We work in the genres of nonfiction, literary and historical fiction, YA, flash, and other literary forms to tell our stories, and will read excerpts from our published and new work.
This event will take place at 5 pm on October 22nd at Blondie’s Bar Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street in San Francisco .
Thanks to everyone who could attend our event on Saturday, December 4th, and thank you all for your engagement and for your wonderful questions. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s the video recording from the event and links to our work.
Seven immigrant writers read their fiction and nonfiction related to immigration, identity, family history and the mother tongue(s). Let’s talk about buckwheat and pickled herring with beets. What do you do if your children refuse to eat traditional foods? Or when your dying grandmother forgets English and Russian and begins speaking to you in Yiddish? Does a Soviet-era secret still matter when the country no longer exists? We explore love, life, loss and the nuances of living with a hybrid identity.
Continue reading “Born in the USSR, Raised in California: Video Recording”Dear Punctured Lines readers — come meet us on Zoom, and help us celebrate the publication of Masha Rumer’s book! (In San Francisco? Come meet us in person, details below.) We’re so happy to welcome Masha’s newly published Parenting With an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children (Beacon Press). Punctured Lines published a Q&A with Masha when this book was still in the proposal stage, and we’ve been following Masha’s Twitter posts about its development with great interest and anticipation. Now that this book is out and available for all to read we are ready to party (and encourage all of our readers to buy it)!
Katherine Young, a poet and translator, gave this interview on BLARB, the blog of the esteemed Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018, Academic Studies Press published Young’s translation of the trilogy, Farewell, Aylis, by Akram Aylisli, currently a political prisoner in his native Azerbaijan (Young has spearheaded efforts to free him, including a recent petition circulated on social media). Olga Zilberbourg reviewed this novel, which Punctured Lines noted in our post. As we also noted, an excerpt from his novella, A Fantastical Traffic Jam, translated by Young, can be found here.
Young’s latest project is the translation of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets (Slavica, forthcoming 2020), an open, unflinching account of her abortion that was controversial when it came out in Russia. As Young says, “Women don’t talk about these things, even with their partners, so to write a book in which you expose the most intimate details of your body and the choices you made medically is a violation of a lot of subtle taboos about women who are supposed to grin and bear their trials and tribulations.”
Young also talks about being a poet and how much Russian poetry has shaped her own: “I feel very much more informed by Russian poets than most American poets. I’ve read Walt Whitman, but I don’t identify with him the same way I might say Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov or Anna Akhmatova.”
You can read the full interview here: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/making-people-feel-uneasy-joanna-chen-conversation-katherine-young/
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