Jamie Olson, Ph.D.

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English Department Chair

Professor, English

“Learning is not only light, as the Russian proverb says; it is also freedom. Nothing liberates a person so much as knowledge, and nowhere is freedom needed so much as in art, in poetry: not for nothing are the arts called ‘liberal,’ or free, even in bureaucratic jargon. Can someone ‘grasp’ or ‘catch’ what surrounds them if they are all tied up inside?”– Ivan Turgenev

Areas of Expertise

  • Modern Poetry
  • American Literature, Culture and Film
  • Exile and Immigration
  • Environmental Studies and Ecocriticism
  • Russophone Literature and Culture
  • Translation Studies and Translated Literature

Education

Ph.D., University of Michigan
M.A., ibid
B.A., The College of Saint Scholastica

Background

Jamie Olson has taught in the English department at 91ֱ's since 2008, when he moved to the Olympia area after finishing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Right after high school, he served for six years in the U.S. Marines, and in 2002 he received his B.A. in English from the College of St. Scholastica, a Benedictine institution in Minnesota. Alongside his English studies, Dr. Olson completed a Russian minor in college and took three years of Slavic coursework in graduate school.

Dr. Olson is a scholar and translator of poetry, and at 91ֱ’s he teaches academic writing, modern American literature, Russian language and literature, world literature in translation, and thematic courses on medicine, the environment, and U.S. immigration. During his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, he specialized in modern and contemporary poetry, and he wrote his dissertation, Rooted Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky, under the direction of two important scholars of modern poetry, George Bornstein and Laurence Goldstein. Dr. Olson is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Literary Translators Association, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, and the .

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Dr. Olson regularly led a summer study tour to Petrozavodsk, Russia, where participants studied Russian language, culture, and history. This program was a longstanding collaboration with Dr. Karen Rosenflanz at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota.

Select publications

  • Translation of “In Memory of a Peninsula,” by Ukrainian poet Irina Yevsa. Circumference, New York, February 2025.
  • Review of The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear, by Boris and Lyudmyla Khersonsky (2022); Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya (2022); and In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky (2023). Translation Review 120:1 (2024): 92-95. Routledge.
  • Translations from Russian of three poems by Ukrainian poet Irina Yevsa. Another Chicago Magazine, Chicago, Illinois, February 2024.
  • “Why Russian’s expansionism should concern all of us” (Op-Ed). The News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington, February 26, 2023, p. 9A.
  • Translations of poems by Semyon Lipkin and Arseny Tarkovsky. Poets of the Front Line: An Anthology of WWII Poems. Moscow: BSG Press, 2020.
  • "Building and Sustaining a Faculty-Led Russian-American Summer Language Exchange." Co-written with Igor Krasnov and Karen Rosenflanz. Classroom on the Road: Designing, Teaching, and Theorizing Out-of-the-Box Faculty-Led Student Travel, edited by Irina Gendelman and Jeff Birkenstein. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. 61-72.
  • Review of Dmitri Prigov's Soviet Texts (2019) and Vasilisk Gnedov's Alphabet for the Entrants (2018). Translation Review 107:1 (2020): 128-134. Routledge.
  • Translation of "On valor, on heroism..." from the cycle "Romances of the Cheryomushki District," by Timur Kibirov. Poetry Northwest (February 2019). Everett, Washington.
  • Translation of "The last songs are gathering," by Maria Stepanova. The Compass Translation Award, Third prize. Cardinal Points 8 (2018): 242. New York.
  • Translations of poems by Igor Irtenyev, Semyon Lipkin, Genrikh Sapgir, Boris Slutsky, and Timur Kibirov. 100 Poems about Moscow: An Anthology. Moscow: BSG Press, 2017.
  • “Revising ‘A Part of Speech’: Americanness and Self-Translation in Joseph Brodsky’s Exile Poetry.” Translation Review 97.1 (2017): 47-60. Routledge.
  • Review of Yevgeny Baratynsky’s A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters, translated by Rawley Grau. Translation Review 97.1 (2017): 104-109. Routledge.
  • “The Landscape of Exile: Joseph Brodsky as an American Poet.” American Writers in Exile. Eds. Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart. Critical Insights. Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2015. 229-44.
  • Translations of “Synopsis” and “The Ethnic Question,” by Timur Kibirov. Atlanta Review. Special issue: Russia (Spring/Summer 2015): 65-66. Atlanta.
  • Translations of three Russian poems by Ukrainian poet Irina Yevsa. Drunken Boat 21 (April 2015).
  • Translations of four Russian poems by Timur Kibirov. Two Lines: World Writing in Translation (March 2015). Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco.
  • Translation of “Rooster, rooster,” by Timur Kibirov. America: The National Catholic Review (February 23, 2015): 31. New York.
  • Translations of three Russian poems by Timur Kibirov. Asymptote (October 2014). Taipei.
  • Review of Relocations: Three Contemporary Russian Women Poets, Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good: Poems, Essays, Actions, and Andrei Sen-Senkov’s Anatomical Theater (poetry). Translation Review 89 (Summer/Fall 2014): 79-84. Routledge.
  • Review of Andrei Gelasimov’s Thirst, translated by Marian Schwartz (novel). Translation Review 84 (Winter 2012): 64-67. Routledge.
  • “The Poetics of Uselessness.” Review of Into the Snow: The Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, translated by Sarah Valentine. Berfrois: Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters (June 20, 2012).
  • Translations of three Russian poems by Ukrainian poet Irina Yevsa. Anomalous Press 5 (Spring 2012). Boston.
  • Translations of five Russian poems by Timur Kibirov. Cardinal Points 12.4 (Fall 2014): 179-87. New York.
  • “Timur Kibirov: Faithful or Skeptic?” Cardinal Points 12.4 (Fall 2014): 175-78. New York.
  • Translation of “Fairy Tale about How There Once Was a Fly Who Outlived the Others.” Russian children’s story by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak. 1897. Chtenia 4.4 (Fall 2011): 27-36. Montpelier, Vermont.
  • “World Culture in American Poetry: A Dialogue between Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky.” USA: Language, Society, Culture: Proceedings of the International Conference. Petrozavodsk: KSPA Press, 2009. 125-28.

Recognition

  • During the 2022-2023 academic year, Dr. Olson taught as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia.
  • In 2017, Dr. Olson was awarded a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to support his translation from the Russian of poems by Timur Kibirov.