Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: “I emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee when I was six years old. In third grade, I started writing poetry in English as a way of finding my way through a stranger’s language and culture, one that would soon become my home. In the former Soviet Union, my family and I were marked as Jewish. In the United States, we were marked as ‘foreign’ and ‘Russian’ and ‘immigrant.’ In my poems, I get to be the one who marks my own identity. For me, poetry is both an act of nostalgia and future making—a way of reaching back to a birthplace, childhood, and even language that is just out of reach, and at the same time, reaching forward to make room for this past in an uncertain future.” (web)
