Central Lakes College’ Verse Like Water program is hosting poet Valzhyna Mort for a free virtual reading at noon on April 27. The link for viewing is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1Uy8pbqEU.
Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, made her American debut in 2008 with the poetry collection Factory of Tears, co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. She is also the author of Collected Body and her most recent collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected.
Mort received the Crystal of Vilenica Award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. In 2010, she received the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, New European Poets, and The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, as well as such literary magazines as The Common, Guernica, New Letters, Poetry, Poetry International, VQR and others.