Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of the poetry collection 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 NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Her other collections include Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Mort’s poetry has been set to music and staged as plays and is performed internationally. In 2020, in the time of post-election state violence against peaceful citizens, she wrote and narrated a radio documentary Belarus Across the Barricades, produced by Monica Whitlock for the BBC News World Service.

Mort has lived in the U.S. since 2005 and teaches at Cornell University.