History Alumnus Shortlisted for a Kobzar Literary Award

FASS alumnus, Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki’s (PhD, History, 2007) book, According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (UBC Press, 2014), has been shortlisted for a Kobzar Literary Award.
According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community was first written by Dr. Zembrzyckias as her PhD dissertation at Carleton University in the Department of History under the supervision of Dr. Marilyn Barber and Dr. John C. Walsh.
As a child, Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her Baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized Ukrainian community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba discloses with honesty and respect what happened when Zembrzycki tried to capture those experiences through oral history. Baba looms large in the narrative, wrestling authority in the interview process away from her granddaughter and then eventually coming to share it. Together, the two women lay the groundwork not only for an insightful and deeply personal social history of Sudbury’s Ukrainian community but also for truly collaborative oral history research and writing.
“I am truly honoured that my book, According to Baba, has been shortlisted for a prestigious Kobzar Literary Award,” said Zembrzycki. “It is the first oral history to be written about Ukrainian Canadians and it is also the first to document the experiences of those immigrants who chose to call a remote northern Ontario mining town—Sudbury—home.
“Additionally, it is an incredibly personal narrative about my own family and its role in building and sustaining this community. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s, my Baba’s, stories about this place and what it meant to her and my goal has always been to give these stories back to my community. Being recognized in this manner, by the Shevchenko Foundation, powerfully symbolizes that return.”

Her former supervisor, Carleton University’s Professor Walsh, was thrilled to learn that his former student has received this recognition for her remarkable work.
“The creativity, accessibility, and scholarly rigour which is a hallmark of According to Baba and all of Stacey’s work demonstrates the transformative potential of collaborative oral and public histories. It is also a model for producing the kind of affective interdisciplinary scholarship and storytelling which is occurring across FASS,” said Walsh.
Since completing her PhD in CU’s Department of History, Zembrzycki has gone on to become an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University. She is an award-winning oral and public historian of ethnic, immigrant, and refugee experience, and author of According to Baba’s accompanying, website: www.sudburyukrainians.ca.
Zembrzycki is also co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which won the American Oral History Association’s 2014 Book Award. Zembrzycki’s current SSHRC funded project, Mining Immigrant Bodies, uses oral history to explore the connections between mining, health, and the environment and their impact on postwar immigrant communities in Sudbury, Ontario. She is also completing a book entitled Chaperoning Survivors: Telling Holocaust Stories on the March of the Living, which uses multiple, life story oral history interviews to understand how five Montreal Holocaust survivors give testimony, remember in-situ, and educate others about the horrors they witnessed.
Read more about Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki’s According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community in the Sudbury Star and on Northern Life.ca.
The Kobzar Literary Award
The Kobzar Literary Award was launched in 2003 by the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko, the biennial $25,000 Kobzar Award recognizes outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts through presentation of a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit. The Kobzar shortlisted authors will read from their works at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), on Sunday October 25 at Harbourfront in Toronto and a winner will be announced at the award ceremony on March 3, 2016 at Palais Royale in Toronto. More information about the prize can be found here: www.kobzarliteraryaward.ca.