One of the highlights of the Festival's Friday program in the Great Hall of the Atheneum will be the appearance of the Belarusian-born poet Valzhyna Mort, who has been living in the United States for nearly eleven years now. Her most recent book of poems, Collected Body, which appeared in 2011, was her first to be written in English and not in Belarusian, as were her first two books and several early chapbooks. Those earlier works received increasingly enthusiastic attention. Reviews rarely failed to mention Mort's impassioned championing of her nation and of the Belarusian language, which had been muffled and marginalized by the dominant Russian culture in the Soviet Union.

Mort grew up in a Russian-speaking family, but began learning Belarusian in middle school, when independence fostered campaigns to re-establish theBelarus identity and its native language. She had been a reader, but mostly of novels, when a friend introduced her to a poem by the banned poet, Joseph Brodsky, whereupon she began reading poetry. That, the musicality she found in her new "native" language, and the influence of several years of music study, all played a part in her beginning, around 18, to write poetry. She took a B.A. in Pedagogy and Linguistics at the State University of Linguistics in Minsk. She continued to write poetry, sometimes during residencies, including one in Warsaw, where she did translations of a Polish poet into Belarusian. She began reading her poems at literary and poetry festivals around Europe, and published several chapbooks of her poems.

By the time Mort showed up with her new book, I'm As Thin As Your Eyelashes, at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland, in the spring of 2005, she was being acclaimed across Central Europe as a gifted and compelling poet, winner of the previous year's Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia for the performance of her poetry. At Galway, she "dazzled" and "battered" (so wrote The Irish Times) the often skeptical Cúirt audience, even when she read several of her poems for which there were not yet English translations. Importantly, she met there Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright and his wife, translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, who were astonished admirers of her passionate artistry and offered to work with her on translating her poems. Later that year she moved to the U.S.

In 2008 her Factory of Tears appeared, new work accompanied by some poems from the early chapbooks and I'm As Thin As Your Eyelashes, co-translated by the author and the Wrights. It was the first Belarusian-English book of poetry to be published in the U.S. Also in 2008, Mort received the Burda Poetry Prize for Eastern European poets. From 2009 to 2012 she was Poet in Residence and teaching at the University of Baltimore. Her much-anticipated book Collected Body came out in 2011, its subject the life experiences of her grandmother and other women in her family, their struggles for survival during the acute pain of wars, in the interims the ache of the downtrodden, sustaining a family and one's own spirit, powerful stories unleashed from a young poet's memory and imagination.

In the few years since that work appeared, Valzhyna Mort's time and energy have been spent caring for a little daughter and working on two anthologies.

Valzhyna Mort will be appearing in the Atheneum Great Hall on Friday, June 17 at 2:30 PM. This event is free thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and donors.

by Dick Burns