Luisa Muradyan – författare

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author’s experience immigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991. What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyan doesn’t try to provide an answer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince’s outstretched hand. Colliding with the grand figures of late ’80s and early ’90s pop culture, Muradyan’s imagination pushes the reader forward, confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.

I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope and longing across generations, continents, and devastation in Ukraine. The author uses humor and popular culture as a way to speak through her sadness. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory all make an appearance in the constantly shifting landscape of this work. This collection also contends with motherhood and what it means to parent through immense loss. Perhaps more than anything the humor in this book acts as an amplifier, a way to hear laughter as clearly as you can hear weeping.