Margarita Iov, translated by Jane Marchant

Profile Photo

Margarita Iov was born in Kiev in 1993, grew up in Berlin and studied at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. She has received invitations to the Klagenfurt Literature Course and to the Open Mike. Her texts have been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Edit and Bella triste.

Jane Marchant is a writer, photographer, and book artist from Northern California. She earned her BA and MFA from Columbia University and was previously the PEN America Literary Awards Program Director. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Apogee, Columbia Journal, Facility: A Magazine about Bathrooms, and elsewhere, as well as anthologized in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2Leaf Press). She is at work on a memoir in the form of an Encyclopedia of Botany of the San Francisco Bay Area, which considers themes of motherhood, racial passing, and interconnected root systems. Follow her unfocused instagram @jane_marchant.

Stories

Cover Photo: This photograph shows a courtyard in Kiev. There is a strange, colorful, large--almost surreal--ceramic sculpture at the center of the photograph that upon closer look you realize is a playground. The buildings behind the playground are all old and eclectic, as if many different styles have been added onto them over the years.
A Family History of Fear

I got a D in math and my sister got cancer. These aren’t causalities, only things that happened one right after the other.