Valya Dudycz Lupescu

(A version of this post also appears as a Kickstarter update.) On Saturday, September 30, 2023, 1,072 backers pledged $23,567 to help bring Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora to life. Our Kickstarter backers included people from all over the world! We are so grateful for all the ways that people showed their support over the past month: becoming backers, sharing posts, telling friends, engaging with our updates. Together we created a global community of readers for these thirty fantastic stories, and we are so excited for people to read them. Many people asked us about other ways to help the[...]

There's a new post up on Kickstarter announcing the full list of authors and featuring the book cover!!! Taras Kopansky is the Ukrainian artist who created the art, "Metahutsulka" for the cover. His piece is inspired by Mykola Senkovsky’s famous 1926 photograph “Old Hutsulka” that won the Grand Prix at the European International Exhibition in Paris. The translated stories have working titles, since our translators are working on them at the moment, but they will give you an idea of what you have to look forward to. You can see what a range of voices we have assembled. Each one adds something[...]

I am touched that Kirk Lawrence-Howard chose to read my poem "Ми тут" as part of a series of poems he has been reading in support of Ukraine. I don't think I've ever heard someone else (definitely not someone whom I do not know) read one of my poems. I got choked up, it's such a gift. He also shares several links to places people can donate and offer support. Sincere thanks, Kirk, for your support of Ukraine and Ukrainian voices.  He also read my friend Ksenia Horobchenko's powerful poem, "River Near Chornobyl” from her collection, A Sky Full of Wings. Tomorrow I'll be posting another[...]

On September 4, 2023, we reached a landmark $10,000 goal for the Embroidered Worlds anthology Kickstarter. Thank you! Now we work to spread the word far and wide about this collection of Ukrainian authors, many of whom have never been translated into English before. The more people we can reach during the Kickstarter campaign, the more incentives we can unlock to make this book even more special! If we reach our $30,000 goal, we will hire three Ukrainian artists to create interior illustrations, and include those in all editions of the book. At $50,000 we will make available a limited-edition, numbered hardcover, with art[...]

We reached our first Kickstarter goal of $5000 in less than 24 hours! That's amazing! Thank you thank you thank you! Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far! Щиро дякуємо!  Someone asked me a question about the stretch goals, so I wanted to take a moment to explain. The way Kickstarter is set up, if a project does not reach its funding goal, none of the rewards are processed and the money is not charged. So instead it encourages creators to establish a series of goals, starting small and building step by step toward the most ambitious version of the final[...]