New Writing Series: olga mikolaivna and Daniel Simon

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 olga mikolaivna and Daniel Simon.

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. She has multiple chapbooks out with Tilted House and Ursus Americanus Press, a translation of Stanislav Belsky's first full collection in English with Lavender Ink / Dialogos, and her debut full-length book of poetry, time illness, will be out with Prroblem Press in 2028. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.

An award-winning editor, poet, translator, and scholar of comparative literature, Daniel Simon is the assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves on the English, International Studies, and Judaic Studies faculty. His poetry has appeared in three verse collections; three anthologies; been translated into six languages; and nominated for multiple awards. The anthology Nebraska Poetry (2017), which he edited, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award and was included on NPR’s “50 States” summer booklist (2022). He also edited Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020; Chinese translation, 2026), named a Publishers Weekly starred pick. His latest anthology, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature, was published in February 2026 by Restless Books. A Nebraska native, Simon received graduate degrees from Indiana University (PhD, 2000).

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