In the wake of the war in Ukraine, many Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American writers and poets have begun to rethink their identities and artistic goals. A particular hotspot for this type of quest and questioning is Odes(s)a, a cosmopolitan and polyglot city that has long welcomed those from all nations, classes, and creeds. Boris Dralyuk is the leading thinker in English on this subject. In an interview with Tulsa Artist Fellow Jennifer Croft, Dralyuk will be encouraged to discuss notions of hybridity, competing concepts of Jewishness, Russophone Ukrainianness, urban pride, and marginality as liberation and saving grace, among many other subjects. Dralyuk translates underrepresented poets from Odes(s)a, and will read from his translations, soon to be published by Transit Books.

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Jennifer Croft won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, as well as numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review Daily, and elsewhere. Her other translations include Romina Paula’s August, Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. While in Tulsa, she'll be working on her novel Amadou, the story of eight translators in search of their author in the primeval forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, as well as completing her book-length essay Notes on Postcards, translating Federico Falco's novel The Plains, and creating her first podcast.

Boris Dralyuk is the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a literary translator and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He has also taught at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Granta, World Literature Today, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, Jewish Quarterly, and other journals. He is the author of Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012) and translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018), Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016), Maxim Osipov’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories (NYRB Classics, 2019, with Alex Fleming and Anne Marie Jackson), and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (MacLehose Press, 2020).