Darina (Dasha) Sikmashvili
Photo by Helen Marder
Bio
Darina (Dasha) Sikmashvili moved to Brooklyn, New York, from her native Lubny, Ukraine, at age eight. Her prose and screenwriting have been awarded the Henfield Prize, the Hopwood Prize, and the Chamberlain Award, among others. She has received scholarships from the Can Sarrat Writing Residency, the Laimun Artists’ Residency, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among others. Prior to completing her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, Sikmashvili worked in film production for over a decade. Currently, she is revising a novel and assembling an essay collection centered on the telephone.
I got the call about receiving the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship at the airport. I was returning to New York, on the last leg of a long, exciting, and consuming trip. I had gathered some notes—scraps, little written snapshots—of my time abroad in a notebook. I had hoped to find something new to distract me from the pressing matter of a novel revision, but all I had were some hastily handwritten pages—urgent at the time but meager on closer inspection.
Standing in line to board my plane after getting off the phone, I remembered that my novel, the same one I received this generous grant for, had started in much the same way: frantically handwritten pages the morning after returning from a trip to Ukraine in the fall of 2020. Then more of those pages, filling notebook after notebook. Then a draft.
Receiving the NEA grant means I will be able to carve out time for another round of novel revisions. It means I will be able to dedicate unbridled headspace to seek out my next project in the piles of unorganized notes. Most importantly, receiving this grant reminds me that the work accumulates—that given patience, attention, and time, a shape emerges. Thank you to the NEA for that reminder and for the opportunity it contains.