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New Meridian Arts is a creative community dedicated to publishing innovative literature and poetry that gives voice to original writers of talent and scope around the world.
The SHATTERED project is the brainchild of Romanian-Canadian visual artist Oana Maria Cajal, a complex international collaboration in protest of Russia’s war in Ukraine and against all wars. Since 2022, this ongoing project has materialized into a series of multimedia events, including exhibitions, performances, and videos. SHATTERED: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY ARTISTS reunites Oana Maria Cajal’s picto-impulses and the poems they inspired, written by women from Ukraine, Romania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The women poets and translators featured in SHATTERED: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY ARTISTS are household names of their native and adoptive countries, including Ana Blandiana, Cristina A.Bejan, Natalka Bilotserkivets, Magda Cârneci, Carmen Firan, Ioana Ieronim, Nora Iuga, OlenaJennings, Lyudmyla Khersonska, Ali Kinsella, Iya Kiva, Nina Kossman, Oksana Maksymchuk,Ruth Margraff, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Vera Rich, Ksenia Rychtycka, ClaudiaSerea, Sylvie Simmons, Vera Sirota, Lesya Ukrainka, Lyuba Yakimchuk, and Katherine E.Young, among others.
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​SHATTERED: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY ARTISTS has been endorsed by the Ukrainian Institute
of America President, Kathy L. Nalywajko, the Romanian Cultural Institute Director, Dorian
Branea, acclaimed writers Ilya Kaminsky, Norman Manea, and Andrei Codrescu, renown
director Andrei Șerban, the late Romanian-born French theater and art critic and professor at
Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3, Georges Banu (1943-2023), and by Simona Miculescu,
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Delegate of Romania to UNESCO.
The SHATTERED international multi-art project was featured so far at La MaMa Umbria
International in Italy; at the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest, Romania,
part of the International Poetry Festival; at Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, part of
the Ukraine+ Freedom Showcase; at the National Theater from Craiova, Romania; at the
Ukrainian Institute of America Open House in New York, NY; and at the Romanian Cultural
Institute in New York, NY.
Praise for SHATTERED: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY ARTISTS
In the midst of this horrific invasion by Russia, artists continue to create—despite the odds.
Artists and writers from other countries echo, in response, in solidarity. This book is an important
act of witness to such solidarity, such echoing. And for this I am especially grateful to the artist,
the poets, translators, and editors. Their work gives sanity to our mad world.
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, professor at Princeton University
Built around our time’s Guernicas like wailers at the funeral of a shattered world, these poems
release a storm of elemental forces. Some of the Romanian and Ukrainian poets in this unique
anthology are well-known in their shadowed or ravaged countries, others are new. The fine
translators are themselves poets who move confidently between languages.
—Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems
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So, the sun is visible through the smoke of shelling! Everything will be spring, everything will be
victory, everything will be Ukraine!
—Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine