Valzhyna Mort Cortese
Valzhyna Mort Cortese
lecturer
School of Communications Design
Contact Information:
Phone: 410.837.6272
E-mail: vcortese@ubalt.edu
M.F.A., American University
B.A., Minsk State University (Belarus)
Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), made her American debut in 2008 with the poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. Factory of Tears also came out in Sweden (2007) and Germany (2009).
Mort received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. In 2010, she received the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine.She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and Internationales Haus der Autoren Graz, Austria.
Her English translations of Eastern European poets can be discovered in the anthology New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008).
There is an urgency and vitality to her poems; the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god and familial love—while many poems question what language is and challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how. The New Yorker writes, "Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language."
Library Journal described Mort's vision as "visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark," and Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears "a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight." Mort writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to re-establish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English.
Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person ever to be on the cover of Poets & Writers magazine.
Works by Valzhyna Mort:
Poems from Collected Body: