Virlana Tkacz & Wanda Phipps have been translating contemporary Ukrainian literature as a team since 1989. They were awarded the Translation Prize given by Agni and Boston University, as well as the National Theatre Translation Fund Award. They are also recipients of three translation grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Currently, they are translating Ukrainian folk songs, tales and incantations. Their translations have appeared in the journals: Agni, Index On Censorship, Visions International, Our Life, and Beacons, as well as in the anthologies From Three Worlds: New Writing From Ukraine, A Kingdom of Fallen Statues: Poems and Essays by Oksana Zabuzhko and Leading Contemporary Poets, both published by Poetry International Press.

Translations by Tkacz and Phipps have been integral to many theater pieces created by Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La Mama Experimental Theatre. The poems of Pavlo Tychyna formed the core of A Light From The East which was presented at La Mama in November 1990 and in Kiev August 1991. In 1991, Tkacz and Phipps translated Ukrainian poems about Chornobyl for Yara’s production of Explosions. This piece was presented as a work-in-progress for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in November 1991 and opened at La Mama in January 1992. Their translation of one of the poems, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s "May," was published by Boston University’s Agni Review in the fall of 1991. The translations of the work of Vasyl Yeroshenko, a blind Ukrainian poet who traveled to Japan in 1914 and started writing Japanese, became the basis of Blind Sight which opened at the Berezil International Theatre Festival in Kharkiv and was performed in Kiev and in New York in the spring of 1993. Next, they translated one of the best known Ukranian dramas, Lesia Ukrainka’s verse play, The Forest Song. Yara’s Forest Song was based on this work and also included a number of their translations of contemporary poetry. The piece opened in Lviv in May 1994 and at La Mama in New York in June 1994 to excellent notices. Yara’s next piece, Waterfall/Reflections, incorporated ancient Ukrainian songs and incantations, as well as contemporary poetry by Ukrainian women in translation by Tkacz and Phipps. Waterfall/Reflections premiered at La Mama in January 1995 and played at the Festival of Experimental Theatre in Kiev in April 1995. Yara’s current project, Virtual Souls, was inspired by Oleh Lysheha’s long poem, "Swan," and includes translated sections of the poem.

Contemporary Ukrainian poetry in the original and in translations by Tkacz and Phipps were used in the Poetry in Performance workshops that have been conducted at Harvard Summer School for the past ten years. Tkacz and Phipps translations have been read at St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Poetry Society of America, as well as at the annual Yara Arts Events at the Ukrainian Institute of America on East 79^th St. in Manhattan. A segment of Yara’s poetry event, Silver Threads, was broadcast on WNYC-TV. Last year Yara performed an evening of poetry by Ukrainian women at the Music and Art Center of Greene County at Soyuzivka in Kerkonkson, NY and a retrospective of poetry used in past Yara productions was performed at a conference in Washington DC. This fall Yara published a hand-made book Ten Years of Poetry from the Yara Theatre Workshops at Harvard that featured twenty translations by Tkacz and Phipps.