Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator who was born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections: Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by the New York Times, and winner of both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011); and Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008). 

With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort coedited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014). She co-translated, with Hanif Abdurraqib, Motherfield: Poetry and Belarusian Protest Diary (Deep Vellum Press, 2022) by Julia Cimafiejeva, which was long-listed for the PEN Translation Prize. Mort also translated Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), for which she received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation.

Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Her work has also been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and was short-listed for the Forward Prize.

Mort is an associate professor at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between Belarusian, English, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.