About New Writing Series

UC San Diego’s New Writing Series invites local, national, and international authors to read and perform throughout the academic year. Welcoming a wide range of authors and genres, including playwrights, poets, translators, essayists, critics, fiction writers, and performance artists, the New Writing Series celebrates both emerging and established award-winning writers. Readers also include Department of Literature faculty and graduate students in the MFA Program in Writing. The readings are followed by in-depth question and answer periods that center on craft and artistic practice. 

The New Writing Series is co-sponsored by the Department of Literature and the UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

Recordings of New Writing Series readings, as well as its predecessor, the New Poetry Series, which dates back to 1972, are part of the Archive for New Poetry in UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

This New Writing Series event features readings from Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and interference. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet and NYRB Poets, 2022), explores the effects of living in a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), examines the challenges of communication between pirates and parrots. He is the editor of SDVIG, a book series devoted to translingual experimentation, for Helsinki’s Rab-Rab Press. His translations of Russian and also Ukrainian experimental poetry and prose from Futurism to the present emphasize wordplay and sound effects. He has won the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the City of Münster International Poetry Prize, etc., and has published the New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. He teaches for the Liberal Studies program at NYU.

Ainsley Morse is a professor of comparative Slavic literatures at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Some recent translation publications include the Odesan poet Maria Galina’s Communiqués (with Anna Halberstadt, Cicada Press 2024) and Goat Song by the early Leningrad modernist Konstantin Vaginov (with Geoff Cebula, NYRB Classics, 2025). With Galina Rymbu and Eugene Ostashevsky, she edited the anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020), and she was poetry translations editor for Ukrainian Literary Modernism (ed. Babak, Ilchuk, Ustinov; ASP, 2026). Forthcoming books include Croatian conceptualist Vlado Martek’s Pre-poetry (WPB 2026), the wry and raw minimalist poems of Yan Satunovsky (in Prosthesis Factory, with Philip Redko, WPB 2027). With Anastasiya Osipova, she co-runs Cicada Press, a small press that publishes Eastern European and Russian poetry in translation; she also consults, translates and edits for the NYC-based Tamizdat Project Press.

Our events are FREE and open to the public!