Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out: we’re a group of immigrant writers and translators from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, coming together to share creative ways of speaking truth to power. Our fiction and non-fiction stems from our community’s memories of life under the USSR’s totalitarian regime and from our response to Russia’s authoritarian tactics of censorship and war.

For an event to celebrate Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, NY Jewish Week is hosting me in conversation with Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone. Together, we’ll explore how private pain becomes public testimony and how the past reverberates in the present. Moderated by award-winning writer Benjamin Balint.

I’ll be presenting Your Presence Is Mandatory in DC’s Bergstrom Press bookstore that specializes on books on Eastern Europe.

I’ll be receiving the Sami Rohr Prize at a ceremony in New York.

Sasha will be talking with Shelly Sanders, author of The Night Sparrow, new historical fiction novel about female snipers in the Soviet army in WWII. The topic of our conversation will be “Writing Jews in the Red Army”. Hosted by the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco.

Sasha is the winner of the 2025 California Book Award in the category of First Fiction. Join Sasha for the virtual awards ceremony along with authors Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and other winners!

I’ll be on a fiction panel focused on the intergenerational effects of traumatic world events along with Sam Sax, Rickey Fayne, and Betty Shamieh. Moderated by Sylvia Brownrigg.

Sebastopol Litquake is back for its second year and I’ll be reading from my work along with several friends and historical fiction authors Lee Kravetz, Michael David Lukas, Joy Lanzendorfer, and Kirsten Menger-Anderson.

I’ll be interviewing Jon Hickey about his debut novel The Big Chief at the Mill Valley Public Library.

For the inaugural Jewish Arts & Bookfest, I’ll be representing the Soviet Jewish experience on a panel “Between War and Peace: Reclaiming Jewish Stories from Russian Literature” with Olga Zilberbourg, Margarita Meklin and Tatyana Sundeyeva.

This reading brings together 18 Soviet-born writers for a deep dive into the individual and collective experiences of the Soviet-born diaspora in the U.S. Held at The Wende Museum dedicated to the Cold War.

Sasha will be leading a panel on How to Publicize Your Book at AWP 2025 at the LA Convention Center, Room 408A. With Ruth Madievsky, Elise Hu, Kathy Daneman, and Rasheed Newson.

I’ll be speaking at The JCC Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver, Canada.

Join Sasha in conversation with New York Times journalist Steven Lee Myers on the legacy of secrecy and misinformation in Russia and Ukraine. For Vasilyuk, her upbringing between Russia and Ukraine and an ambiguous family lineage inspired her first novel Your Presence Is Mandatory, a riveting story of a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran and his family who reckon with his lifelong secrecy against the backdrop of Soviet history. Myers, author of The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, has been covering misinformation and disinformation for NYT for over 20 years, including extensive coverage of Russian election interference efforts. Together, Myers and Vasilyuk untangle and explore the personal effects of far reaching political campaigns that put to question what is fact and what is fiction.

Sasha will be talking about the experience of publishing your first book at Dominican University of California MFA Residency.

I’ll be speaking at the debut author panel at New York Jewish Book Festival held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.

I’ll be reading & discussing my work at MyBiblioteka, a new book salon in Brooklyn, along with journalist Simon Shuster, author of The Showman.

Join me for lunch at the gorgeous Salmagundi Club in Manhattan as I’ll talk books and politics.

I’m reading at Rally Reading Salon, a place where readers, writers, activists, and citizens find the stories they have in common along with Eugene Lim and Jean Hannah Edelstein.

JBC Virtual Writers Conference panel “New Jewish Voices with Danny Goodman, Sasha Vasilyuk, Sarah Seltzer and Zachary Solomon”. RSVP on https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/events/2024-jewish-writers-conference

I’ll be on a panel at BookCity festival in Milano. More info on https://www.bookcitymilano.it/eventi/2024/tradurre-di-guerra-aspettando-la-pace

Debut author panel as part of USF’s Creative Writing MFA program “Life After MFA”

At this year’s LitCrawl, I’m joining a group reading “Passionate Thinking in Diaspora: Writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova Share Fiction and Nonfiction”

Author presentation at Rotary Club of Walnut Creek

Author presentation: From WWII to the War in Ukraine. Hosted by the Rotary Club of Mission San Rafael

Your Presence Is Mandatory: From WWII until Ukraine War author talk at Rotary Club of San Francisco, the second oldest rotary club in the world.

I’ll be discussing my novel with Lee Kravetz at a luncheon cohosted by Orinda Books and the Alta Mesa Center for the Arts

I’ll be premiering the Italian version of my novel at Italy’s premier literary festival, Pordenonelegge, https://www.pordenonelegge.it/.