Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with author Julia Cimafiejeva and translators Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib to discuss and celebrate the release of their new collection of poetry Motherfield: Poems and Belarusian Protest Diary.
Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield?
A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian writer and translator. She is the author of four poetry collections in Belarusian and a documentary book Minsk Diary. Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in different projects, anthologies, and magazines. Motherfield: Poems and Belarusian Protest Diary translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib is her first collection to be available in English. She lives in exile.
Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, most recently: Music for the Dead and Resurrected, named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by the New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Her two previous collections are Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for her translation work. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort writes in English and Belarusian.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of multiple award-winning and New York Times-bestselling books, including poetry collections The Crown Ain't Worth Much and A Fortune for Your Disaster and nonfiction collections They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Go Ahead in the Rain: A Tribe Called Quest, and A Little Devil in America.
The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith
The Transnational Series focuses on stories of migration, the intersection of politics and literature, and works in translation and is supported by the independent bookstore Brookline Booksmith. Subscribe to the Transnational Series newsletter for information on upcoming events, book recommendations, and more.