Oleh Lysheha was born on October 30, 1949 in Tysmenytsia, near the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. He studied foreign languages and was expelled from Lviv University during a purge in 1972 for his interest in contemporary American poetry. He was drafted and sent to do military duty in Siberia and in the Buryat Republic. There he found his lifelong interest in Asian and indigenous cultures. When he returned to Ukraine, Lysheha was isolated from official Soviet literary activities and was not published throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His first collection of poetry, The Great Bridge,published in 1989, was like nothing else printed in the official sources. In 1994 Suchasnist journal published a cycle of his longer poems. He also published his poems and prose pieces in the journal Svitovyd. He was a Fulbright Scholar and writer-in-residence at Pennsylvania State University from 1997 to 1998. The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha in English translations by the author and James Brasfield was published in 1999 by the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize. In 2002 Lysheha published his collection To Snow and Fire. The 2012 edition of The Great Bridge included Lysheha’s newer work. In 2014, Ivan Malkovych published Winter in Tysnmenytsia: Selected Poems by Oleh Lysheha in A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha’s prestigious Ukrainian Poetry Anthology Series. Oleh Lysheha died in Kyiv on December 17, 2014. Lysheha’s poetry has been incorporated into a number of theatre pieces created by the Yara Arts Group, including Virtual Souls and Flight of the White Bird. In 2003 Yara staged his poem “Swan” and in 2011 “Raven,” which was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre award for design. In 2013 Yara created Dream Bridge, which included Lysheha’s earliest poems.
Virlana Tkacz heads the Yara Arts Group and has directed almost forty original shows at La MaMa Theatre in New York, as well as in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar, and Ulan Ude. She has received an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for her translations with Wanda Phipps. Their translations have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and are integral to the theater pieces created by Yara Arts Group.
Wanda Phipps is the author of the books Mind Honey, Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in over one hundred literary magazines and numerous anthologies. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps have received the Agni Poetry Translation Prize, the National Theatre Translation Fund Award, and thirteen translation grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, was published by Yale University Press in 2019. Their translations have also appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and are integral to the theater pieces created by Yara Arts Group.
