writer-IN-RESIDENCE
June 12-26, 2025
Paul Ukrainets
Paul S Ukrainets is a poet/writer, translator, and educator. Their work studies state violence, private and public languages, surveillance technologies and (self-)perception. They grew up in Russia and the UK, and now live in Oakland on unceded Ohlone, Lisjan, and Muwekma land. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025); Hayden’s Ferry Review, bi+lines (fourteen poems, 2022), and the Seventh Wave. They’ve been a Round Top Poetry Festival fellow, a Patricia Cleary Miller Poetry Prize finalist, and Princeton in Asia Media Fellow. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin.
Artist Statement
With the gift of time at Good Hart, I plan to spend my time revising and writing my debut manuscript-in-progress. In particular, I hope to research and write a poetic sequence inspired by the work of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, whose incarceration in Soviet prison camps changed his visual and written language in dramatic ways. In my work, cinematographic framing devices are a central metaphor for the mediation of the speakers’ perceptions and narratives. To me, all frames are enactments of power. For the manuscript section I want to develop at Good Hart, I will study Sergei Parajanov’s pre- and post-incarceration diction to write further into some of my work’s central questions: what is language that cannot be captured? How do I apprentice myself to it? Through engaging with Parajanov’s work and private life, I will think through how surveillance shapes one’s relationship to aesthetics, power, and narrative frames.
Community Engagement
