Virlana Tkacz was born in Newark and lives in New York's East Village where she heads Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre. She has written, translated, and directed over forty original theatre pieces that were performed in New York, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulan Ude, and Ulaanbaatar. She is the recipient of a NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship and three Fulbright Fellowships. In 2019, in collaboration with Wanda Phipps, she translated and edited What We Live For/What We Die For: Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, published by Yale University Press. A poem from this book was recently printed in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Three Wooden Trunks is a collection of poems about memory, the poet's Ukrainian roots, and her family's pursuit of a sweeter, easier life in America.