Wanda Phipps is an American poet, translator, performer, dramaturg, and founding member of Yara Arts Group. Her writing moves through desire, city life, relationships, ritual, travel, memory, spirituality, and the charged details of everyday experience. Alongside her own poetry, she has built a long collaborative practice translating Ukrainian literature into English.
Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems
Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems, published by Soft Skull Press, gathers short poems shaped by immediacy, observation, intimacy, and the ordinary rituals of beginning a day. The compact form suits Phipps’s interest in turning passing sensations and encounters into concentrated lyric events.
Field of Wanting
Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire brings love, sexuality, urban movement, longing, rejection, humor, ritual, and spiritual searching into a broad field of appetite. The poems are grounded in lived places and social encounters, giving desire a physical geography of streets, rooms, trains, bodies, and conversations.
Break-up sonnets and other sequences
Phipps has repeatedly worked with sequences and compact book forms, including Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets, Lunch Poems, Silent Pictures Recognize the World, and Rose Window or Prosettes. These projects let recurring emotions and images develop through accumulation, variation, and shifts of perspective.
Performance and Yara Arts Group
As a founding member of Yara Arts Group, Phipps has worked across poetry, theater, dramaturgy, song, and performance. This collaborative setting gives her literary practice a strongly vocal and embodied dimension. Text can move from page to stage, where rhythm, gesture, music, translation, and collective performance reshape its possibilities.
Translating Ukrainian poetry
Phipps has collaborated with Virlana Tkacz for decades on translations of Ukrainian poetry. Their work includes poetry by Oleh Lysheha and Serhiy Zhadan as well as theatrical and ritual texts. Translation here is sustained literary collaboration: attention to voice, performance, cultural context, and the movement of poems between languages.
Serhiy Zhadan in English
Tkacz and Phipps translated major selections of Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry for English-language readers. Their work appears in What We Live For, What We Die For and later projects, bringing Zhadan’s urban, political, musical, and intimate poetics into a new linguistic field while preserving the energy of performance and speech.
An urban poetics of attention
Across Phipps’s own collections, the city often becomes a structure for perception. Street names, transit, conversations, art, food, work, desire, and chance encounters accumulate into lyric maps. Her poems turn movement through public space into a record of emotional and sensory attention.
Where to read Wanda Phipps
Phipps’s official website presents her books, biography, performances, and translation work. Her publisher biography summarizes her poetry and work with Yara Arts Group. Readers can also explore Yara Arts Group’s presentation of the Zhadan translations. Continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and love poems.