At the tip of my tongue: Belarus. I was born there in 1986. I left it as many times as I returned, but since 2021 there is no coming back. I come from an artistic family. My grandfather, orphaned at the age of three, once took his grief-filled rhymes to the acclaimed...
Born in Belarus in 1986, Lena is an artist and poet. As the author of numerous books and shows, Lena’s work has appeared in The New York Times and Poetry Archive, among other publications. She was recently accepted to the NYU low-residency MFA in Paris. After living in the UK as a young adult, she returned to Belarus in 2013. Following a brutal oppression of the anti-regime uprising in Belarus, she fled the country in 2021, a few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She now resides in the US.