Olena Boryshpolets was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and is a poet, writer, journalist, actress, and culture manager. She was a laureate of the Konstantin Paustovsky Municipal Literary Prize for the collection of poems "Blue Star", a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, and co-founder of the public organization "Creation Without Borders". After the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine in February 2022, she went to Poland and worked with other Ukrainian women to tell European audiences about the war and its consequences in the Polish-Ukrainian play "Life in the Event of War." Olena is a writer-in-residence at City of Asylum and a Research Scholar at the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.