Please join us on Tuesday, April 13, at 7 p.m. for brief readings and a conversation with poet Valzhyna Mort and fiction writer Raul Palma. Writer, actor, and ICOA board member Kate Blackwood will moderate.

UPDATE: The event was a success! Watch it on YouTube.

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of the poetry collections Factory of Tears, Collected Body, and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Granta, Gulf Coast, White Review, and many more publications. She has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Mort teaches at Cornell and writes in English and Belarusian.

Raul Palma is a novelist, short story writer, and assistant professor of writing at Ithaca College, where he serves as the faculty advisor to Stillwater Magazine. His fiction has been included in Best Small Fictions 2018 and rated distinguished/notable in Best American Short Stories 2016. He has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from the CubaOne Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Santa Fe Writer’s Conference, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. He is working on a novel titled A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens.

The session is the third of four monthly readings in “Odysseys: Ithaca Writers on Exile, Wandering, and Searching for Home.” The series is organized by Ithaca City of Asylum and cosponsored by Buffalo Street Books, Global Cornell, Cornell Migrations, Ithaca College Department of Writing, Odyssey Bookstore, Story House Ithaca, and Tompkins County Public Library.

You can watch earlier sessions and register for Session 4 at the links below.

• Session 1: Gail Holst-Warhaft and Aoise Stratford (watch on YouTube)
• Session 2: Sorayya Khan and Raza Rumi (watch on YouTube)
• Session 4: Minfong Ho and Kenneth McClane (May 18, 7 p.m., register here)