About the Author

This blog was created to document the year I lived in Ukraine (2005-2006) on a Fulbright Fellowship. While there, I researched and wrote about the "mail-order bride" phenomenon and life in the former Soviet Union. Since returning to the U.S., I have allowed this blog to fall into disuse. Updates are infrequent.

• If you like what you've read here, please look for my other published work. Several of the almost twenty stories and essays I've published deal with communism, Russia, Ukraine, or the Soviet Union. My first published story, The Secret Meeting of the Secret Police, reimagines the KGB coup of 1991 to foretell the coming power of the internet, while "Something Red, Something Blue," in Low Rent #3, tells the story of a progressive American who tells his fiancee, a Republican, that he's a communist, if only because he gets cold feet while shopping for engagement rings. Two of my favorite stories, Kamkov the Astronomer and Vladimir's Mustache, are set in the time of The Great Purge and were published in The Cincinnati Review and Ninth Letter, respectively. Though they aren't available online, a third purge story is. It received special mention in Drunken Boat's inaugural Panliterary Awards competition.
  
  My short fiction has otherwise appeared in Fourteen Hills, Barrelhouse (both online and print), Ars Medica, and Permafrost. My creative non-fiction can be found in Salt Hill, Noo (#8) and Swink. The last two of those are set in Ukraine. Ninth Letter will also publish an essay of mine this winter that compares the Ukrainian and American medical systems. Salt Hill (#23) has also published my novella, "The Castrato of St. Petersburg," which is set during the time of Peter the Great.
  
  
• Prior to returning to academia, I worked as a print and broadcast journalist.

You can contact me at StephanClark (at) gmail (dot) com.