Olya Samilenko

Born in New York City, Dr. Olya Samilenko is the child of Ukrainian immigrants who emigrated to the United States at the end of World War II as political refugees. She graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, went on to earn a doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and taught Russian language and literature at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. She subsequently worked as an interpreter, translator and researcher for the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine of 1931-32, contributing a chapter to the final report in 1988. She is currently an Associate Professor of Russian at Goucher College and Director of the Johns Hopkins University-Goucher College Cooperative Program in Russian Language, Literature, and Culture. Dr. Samilenko has published a translation of Ukrainian Elements in the Work of Classical Composer Iakov Soroker, Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 1995. Her most recent translation was a set of one hundred Avante-Garde journals for the Rare Book Gallery exhibit in New York in April of 2015. The Snow Goose Chronicles, published in November of last year by Liberty Publishing House in New York was included in the exhibit during the dedication of the National Holodomor (Famine of 1931-32) Memorial in Washington D. C. in November of 2015. Loosely based on the arrest, deportation and exile of her maternal grandmother during Stalin’s forced collectivization in 1929, the historical novel satirizes the Soviet Union of the thirties. Dr. Samilenko currently directs the the Goucher College-Johns Hopkins University Cooperative Program in Russian and resides in Towson, Maryland with two cockatiels, one sun conure, and a shih-tzu named Bobby.