The publication of The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology commemorates the tenth year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Series has recurrently organized readings in the US for Ukraine’s leading writers since 2008. The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that have imaginatively engaged pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and expressed its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

Since 2007, Mark Andryczyk has been teaching Ukrainian literature at Columbia University and serving as the director of the Ukrainian Studies Program at its Harriman Institute. He is the author of the monograph The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012) - Ukrainian edition (Piramida, 2014) - and a translator of Ukrainian literature into English.