John Hennessy and Ostap Kin have co-translated a new anthology of poems titled Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, which is forthcoming as part of the new Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature (HUP). Hennessy's own new poems are also forthcoming in several journals, including the Massachusetts Review and the St. Petersburg Review.
About Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond:
In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.
Written in 1942–2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and timeframes, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.