Tetiana Yakovenko

Tetiana Yakovenko was born in the village of Sobolivka, Teplyk Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine, May 16, 1954. After graduating from Sobol Secondary School, she worked at a local sugar factory, taught at schools in the Teplyk Raion, and worked for the Komsomol. She graduated from Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University (VSPU) (1977), and did postgraduate studies at the Institute of Literature, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv as a Candidate of Sciences, Philology (1987).[2]

From 1983 to 2012, Yakovenko was an Associate Professor of Ukrainian literature at the Institute of Philology and Journalism, VSPU.[2] Her research interests include history of Ukrainian literature, translation studies, and comparative studies.

Yakovenko was elected a deputy of the Vinnytsia Oblast Council, 5th convocation, and chair of the standing commission on education, culture and spiritual revival. She is also member of the Presidium of the Vinnytsia Oblast Council. For more than ten years, she managed the regional children's literary and art studio "Network". From 1999 to 2012, she served as head of the literary and artistic studio, "Sails", at VSPU . Since 2012, she has been the head of the literary and artistic studio "Slovotsvit" Vinnytsia Humanitarian and Pedagogical College. She was a member of the National Writers' Union of Ukraine Admissions Committee for more than ten years.[3] She is the chair of the Vinnytsia Regional Local History Literary and Artistic Public Organization "Velyka Rodnya".[4]

The first poem of the nine-year-old Yakovenko was published in 1963 in the Soviet newspaper for children and youth Зірка (Star). Thereafter, she has authored about twenty books of poetry, hundreds of publications in periodicals, several dozen prefaces to the first books of young authors of Vinnytsia Oblast, and served as a compiler of a number of regional literary almanacs, including several issues of Подільського перевесла (Podolsky oar).[5]

Yakovenko is the author of dozens of scientific papers and manuals in the field of Ukrainian and world literature, and literary local lore. In particular, she studied the works of Yuri Klen, Leonid Mosendz, Mykhailo Stelmakh, Nikolay Nekrasov, Matsuo Bashō, Rudyard Kipling, and others, as well as the philological aspects of Scripture. Her chants of biblical books were published in journal periodicals, including The Book of the Prophet Zephaniah (2008), The Book of Ruth (2008), The book of the prophet Jonah (2008), and others. Dozens of songs based on Yakovenko's poems have been written by Vinnytsia composers Oleksandr Pilchen, Leonid Hrushevsky, Olga Yanushkevych, Andriy Shinkovych, Natalia Todosienko, Yakov Polyakhivsky and Maksym Kolesnikov (Kazakhstan).