B. 1967
Olga Maslova, a white woman with long blond hair stand in front of Kyoto Zen garden

Photo courtesy of the poet

Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American poet, writer, and theater designer, born and raised in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She is a MacDowell Fellow and was a Fulbright Scholar, and winner of LitMag’s 2025 Emily Dickinson Award for Poetry.

Her poems appear in numerous journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review (a 2024 nominee for Best of the Net), New American Writing, Plume Poetry, Frontier Poetry (second place, 2023 Ekphrastic Poetry Prize), RHINO Poetry, Strange Horizons, Naugatuck River Review (semi-finalist for the Naugatuck Prize). Her debut manuscript Light Travels was a semifinalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award.

As a librettist, she collaborates with composer Ilya Demutsky on large-scale vocal works including the oratorio The Last Day of the Eternal City, the opera Black Square, and the art song cycle Venetian Cycle, performed in the United States and Russia. 

Maslova is Associate Professor of Costume Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.