Welcome to the May issue of WordCityLit Journal. This issue features a human rights theme and stands in solidarity with Ukraine and its people. The work is dedicated to the resilient people of Ukraine, speaking against the inhumanity of war, calling for peace and acknowledging the experiences of all poets and writers personally involved in this tragedy or simply reacting to it.

Our previous issue had been committed to sharing the pandemic experience that both united and divided us. We invited poets and writers to address this collective tragedy and share their personal take on it in the hope that their words will offer comfort and hope. Little did we know that more tragedy was about to hit the world in February when Russia invaded Ukraine causing an unprecedented refugee crisis.

Thus, the work included in this issue portrays a variety of reactions and a different understanding of this invasion that affected not only the Ukrainian people, but also their relatives, family and friends living abroad. Above all, artists all over the world, as well as simple people felt the need to voice their concerns or show their empathy.

We, the editors of WordCityLit, feel grateful for the way in which the contributors of this issue chose to interpret the current and historic human rights theme and incorporated it in their work, at the same time, standing against the Russian war and in support of the Ukrainian people, through their words.

We are also happy to have been given permission to include in our May issue, poetry in translation from the Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine anthology edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky, with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky and an afterword by Polina Barskova. These poems by different compelling poetic voices all over Ukraine, engage with the experience of war and make reference to specific events that are part of the Ukrainian history. They also mirror the poems we have included in the May issue, in a common effort to acknowledge the urgency of poetry and translation equally, in such times of alienation and loss.

We thank you kindly for reading and appreciate your willingness to join us in our effort to speak up and defend all human rights.

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Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the current Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib.