Join poet and translator Valzhyna Mort (co-translator, Motherfield by Julia Cimafiejeva) in conversation with Samyak Shertok. This in-person event is presented by the Department of English at Southern Methodist University.

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Valzhyna Mort is the author of te poetry collections Factory of Tears (2008), Collected Body (2012) and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020). She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast translation prize and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Most recently, Mort co-translated Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield (Deep Vellum, 2022) alongside Hanif Abdurraqib.

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellow and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is currently the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at SMU.