Dzvinia Orlowsky


Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry.
Jeff Friedman's and her co-translation of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczyslaw Jastrun was published by Dialogos in 2014, and she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship in support of continuing their translation work of Jastrun's poems.
In addition to the above, other honors include a Pushcart Prize ; A Massachusetts Cultural Council Professional Development Grant ; a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant ; She has also been a finalist in the Grolier Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize at Ohio State University, and the New Literary Awards Prize.
Dzvinia Orlowsky's poems, short fiction pieces, and translations have appeared in a number of magazines, including Agni, Columbia, Field, New Flash Fiction, 100 Word Story, Los Angeles Review, Plume, Poetry International, The Baffler, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Spoon River Review, and The American Poetry Review.
Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies including Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse ; Nothing Short of 100: Selected tales from 100 Word Story ; Plume Anthologies 2-6; The Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises and a Poetry Anthology ; Never Before, Poems about First Experiences ; Poetry from Sojourner, A Feminist Anthology ; Dorothy Parker’s Elbow ; A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry. A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology ; and From Three Worlds: New Writing from the Ukraine.
A founding editor of New York-based Four Way Books, she is also contributing editor to Agni and served as Editor for Poetry in Translation for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. She has taught poetry at the Mt. Holyoke Writers' Conference; The Boston Center for Adult Education; Emerson College; Gemini Ink; Keene State College Summer Writers Conference; Stonecoast Summer Writers’ Conference; Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing; Writers in Paradise; the 2005 Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference at Pine Manor College; and as 2012-2013 Visiting Guest Poet and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Providence College. She is also founder and director of NIGHT RIFFS: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. Dzvinia Orlowsky currently teaches creative writing at Providence College and serves as core faculty of poetry at The Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. She lives with her husband, Jay Hoffman, in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

Published works