Stella Hayes is the author of a poetry collection, One Strange Country (What Books Press, November 2020). Hayes earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and for the Pushcart Prize, as well as appeared in Prelude, The Poetry Project’s The Recluse, The Lake and Spillway, among others, and is forthcoming from Stanford’s Mantis and Poet Lore.
Bio
She began her life in a book-filled home in an agricultural town an hour outside of Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union. In 1977, her family of five — her father excluded — left for the U.S., settling first in Chicago.
At USC, she studied creative writing with a focus on poetry with celebrated poet David St. John, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. More recently, she has taken advanced classes in poetry and fiction at 92Y and was asked to do a reading there in the spring of 2018. She is a graduate student at NYU M.F.A in poetry and is assistant fiction editor at Washington Square Review.
Stella's debut poetry collection, One Strange Country, is a meditation on her bilingual, bicultural life experience.
She has completed her follow-up collection,
Nowhere with Him, about her late father, Grigory "Grisha" Mihaylovich Fridman.
She lives in Larchmont, N.Y., with her husband and two children.
