The Poet and the Poem
2026-27 Series
Featured Dzvinia Orlowsky and Leah Umansky
Click here for D_Orlowsky and L_Umansky podcast.mp3
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian-American poet, translator, and editor, and the author of seven poetry collections (Carnegie Mellon University Press), including A Handful of Bees (reissued in 2008 in the Classic Contemporary Series), Bad Harvest (Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read"), and Those Absences Now Closest (a finalist for the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award; Brilliant Books' Most Brilliant of 2024). Her honors include the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize in Poetry and Poetic Translation, two Pushcart Prizes, two NEA Literature Translation Fellowships, and the New England Poetry Club's Samuel Washington Allen Prize. With Ali Kinsella, she translated from the Ukrainian the poetry collections Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Natalka Bilotserkivets (AAUS Translation Prize winner; Griffin-finalist) and Lost in Living by Halyna Kruk (PEN-finalist) as well as Oleksander Dovzhenko's classic "film memoir," The Enchanted Desna. She is a founding editor of Four Way Books (1993–2001) and Writer-in-Residence in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Lasell University.
Leah Umansky is a writer, educator, artist and the author of two forthcoming books, the memoir, Delicate Machine (Dzanc Books, 2027), and the forthcoming collection, Ordinary Splendor (Etruscan Press, 2028). Her most recent collection is Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024). She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown Podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, POETRY, The Nation, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as The Guggenheim, The New York Public Library, Poetry School London, Poets House, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY www.leahumansky.com
