The poem began, as Olena Boryshpolets tells it, as a logical continuation. She had already spent years circling a question — what she calls the feminine principle, the role of the modern woman in society, her strength and her powerlessness, and the spheres of influence she might actually hold over a world that keeps producing disheartening events. Bride is the long-form answer to that question, and on the evening of October 20, 2026, it arrives at Alphabet City on Pittsburgh's North Side as a musical-poetic performance, staged for the first time.
The premiere is free and runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at 40 W. North Avenue, the North Side building that City of Asylum has made its permanent home. Boryshpolets wrote the poem and directs the performance. She is joined by Jake Grefenstette as editor and by the Ukrainian violinist Marta Krechkovsky on violin.
In her own description of the work, Boryshpolets frames Bride as an exercise in seeing from the outside. The poem, she says, will allow the reader to see the world through the eyes of others and to understand motivations different from their own. Its events, she writes, will serve as a kind of archive and, in a way, a mirror of human decisions and their consequences — a mirror that not only provokes but forces reflection. It is the language of someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about how a person's private choices ripple outward, and who has watched those ripples travel in real time.
Boryshpolets comes from Odesa, and she has a line about it that City of Asylum likes to quote: they say you can leave Odesa, but Odesa will never leave you. She brought the city with her to Pittsburgh. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she worked as a poet, writer, journalist, actress, and cultural manager. After the invasion she traveled to Poland, where she spent a year acting in a Polish-Ukrainian production called Life in Case of War — a title that needs no gloss. She is a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, a co-founder of the public organization Creativity Without Borders, and a member of PEN America.
Her arrival in Pittsburgh was not accidental. In response to the 2022 invasion and its impact on writers, City of Asylum launched a Fellowship for Ukrainian Writers, funded in large part by The Educational Foundation of America, to bring three Ukrainian writers to the city so they could continue to research, write, and publish despite the ongoing war. Boryshpolets, Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, and Volodymyr Rafeyenko all arrived over the course of 2023. They settled on the North Side with their families. Boryshpolets has been a writer-in-residence in that fellowship since 2023, a research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh from 2023 to 2026, and is now a research scholar at Chatham University.
The fellowship is only one expression of an organization with an unusually literal name. City of Asylum traces its origins to a 1997 talk in Pittsburgh by Salman Rushdie, who had spent years in hiding under the fatwa issued after The Satanic Verses and who mentioned, in passing, the European network of "Cities of Asylum" — municipal arrangements, organized through the International Parliament of Writers, that gave endangered writers a year or two of support and physical safety. Two people in the audience, Diane Samuels and Henry Reese, were immediately drawn to the mission. They wrote to the European cities about starting a Pittsburgh chapter and, getting no reply, kept writing until 2003, when they were connected with the author Russell Banks, then charged with expanding the movement in the United States. Pittsburgh joined the network alongside Las Vegas and Ithaca — but while those two were sponsored by universities, Pittsburgh's chapter began and has continued as something more independent and more rooted in a neighborhood.
That rooting is visible in the way the organization works. Its long-term residency for exiled writers and artists provides a home, a stipend, legal counsel, medical benefits, and professional development for two years or more, with the stated goal of letting each resident continue to create while transitioning to a stable, independent life in exile. City of Asylum notes that every writer or artist it has hosted has produced a full-length work while in residence. Alphabet City, its home on West North Avenue, holds a bookstore and a stage that hosts readings, concerts, and films; the surrounding blocks on Sampsonia Way carry murals on the houses of writers who have lived there.
Boryshpolets has used that stage before. In March 2024, Alphabet City hosted the world premiere of Sorry, I Don't Understanding, an original play she wrote, produced, and starred in with the Algerian writer Anouar Rahmani, another City of Asylum resident. Performed in Navajo, Ukrainian, Algerian Arabic, French, and English, it told the story of a Ukrainian woman and an Algerian man who arrive in Pittsburgh and become accidental neighbors — she fleeing Russia's war, he fleeing government persecution for supporting LGBT rights — passing each other in silence until they realize they have to tell each other their stories. The play grew out of the two writers' own experience of meeting as residents. "One day we got tired of walking past each other in silence and started talking," Boryshpolets said at the time. "It was difficult, because at that time I hardly spoke English and was in a critical state of adaptation, when communication with people is difficult. But it is communication with the world and others that a person needs at such moments. I said 'I'm sorry, I don't understand' many, many times in America, and what I felt inside grew into the idea of the play."
Bride belongs to the same body of work. Boryshpolets is the author of the short story collection Ukrainian Detox, which has been translated into English and is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and the poetry book Orpheus and Eurydice in New York. Her chapbook-length poem New Calypso, published by the Pittsburgh indie press Lefty Blondie Press, launched at City of Asylum in October 2025. In an interview with the press around that launch, she described how differently her prose and poetry come to her: prose is assembled in her head, sometimes over six months, before she sits down and writes it in a few hours, while poems happen here and now. Asked where she creates, she answered with characteristic dryness — a bed with a comfortable mattress and a lot of pillows, morning and silence — and compared her writing setup unfavorably to Schiller's drawer of rotten apples and Haydn's powdered wig.
The collaborators on Bride extend that web of local relationships. Krechkovsky plays in the Clarion Quartet, a PSO ensemble devoted to music the Nazis labeled "Entartete Musik" — degenerate music — and to restoring it to the repertoire. Grefenstette is director of the International Poetry Forum, the Pittsburgh organization founded in 1966 that has brought more than 800 poets and performers from over 50 countries to the city, and whose reading series once hosted W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Czesław Miłosz. A poem written in exile, staged with a Ukrainian violinist from the symphony and edited by the steward of a sixty-year-old Pittsburgh poetry institution, is a fairly precise portrait of what the city's literary ecosystem looks like now.
What audiences will see on October 20 is a premiere, which means the work is being finished in public. Boryshpolets has described Bride as an attempt to build a mirror — something that does not merely provoke but forces reflection — and to preserve a record of human decisions and their consequences. That is a modest way to describe a performance about war, womanhood, and influence, but it is consistent with how she has talked about her work since arriving: as testimony assembled from the inside, offered to people who may not share her history. The event is free, but City of Asylum asks attendees to RSVP through its website. Doors are at Alphabet City, 40 W. North Avenue, on the North Side, on Tuesday, October 20, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.