Spring 2026 Book Club: Friday, April 17th: Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters by Iya Kiva

This spring CGES is pleased to co-host our book club with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The selected titles for this semester explore themes of contested memory surrounding histories of violence and conquest across Europe. 

We hope you will join us on Friday,April 17th from 4:00 - 5:30pm, 710 Social Sciences to discuss a special collection of poetry, Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters by Iya Kiva

Born out of the pain and loss of a fragmented present, Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Since war broke out in her native Donetsk in 2014, she has become a prominent voice of Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens, finding new metaphors to express the ongoing uncertainties of this time. Kiva first began publishing in her native Russian but, since the Donbas war, she has shifted to writing in Ukrainian. Her poems also reflect her mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish background and contribute to defining contemporary Ukraine—a culturally and linguistically diverse sovereign country. As Ukraine struggles for its existence, Kiva offers lyric poems that acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.