Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnipro, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, which pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart, a virtual poetry reading series born out of pandemic but meant to outlast it.
Julia's newest collection, 40 WEEKS will be out in April and available for preorder through YesYes Books. She is also the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is available from Lost Horse Press and perhaps your local book store. You can find her poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She is Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in Creative Writing at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her family.