Jazz Poetry 2026: The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis with Mark Andryczyk, Rania Mamoun & Volodymyr Rafeyenko

In a month celebrating infusion, collaboration, and unique, incredible performance, who better to herald in Jazz Poetry 2026 but newly crowned Artist of the Year (DownBeat Magazine) James Brandon Lewis? The beloved six-time headliner returns to City of Asylum this May with a fresh new sound and his punk-jazz group, the Messthetics. 

This performance features improvisational collaborations with City of Asylum Writers-in-Residence Rania Mamoun and Volodymyr Rafeyenko, as well as a reading from Volodymyr’s long-time literary translator, Mark Andryczyk. The collaborations will be followed by a brief intermission, and then a full set from the band.

Featured Musicians:

James Brandon Lewis: saxophone

Anthony Pirog: guitar

Joe Lally: bass

Brendan Canty: drums

About the Band: 

Joe Lally was onstage, playing at full throttle, when he realized that his band had found a true kindred spirit. It was the fall of 2021, and the Messthetics—the instrumental trio of Lally on bass, his former Fugazi bandmate Brendan Canty on drums, and guitarist Anthony Pirog—were at Brooklyn venue the Bell House, digging into their uptempo riff workout “Serpent Tongue.” Joining them for the piece was a special guest, acclaimed jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, making only his second cameo with the group after a drop-in at another New York show back in 2019. That first meeting had been a success, but this time, Lewis’ presence sparked something new.

About the Poets:

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). His monograph The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Andryczyk is editor, compiler, and a translator of The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017)—republished by Penguin in 2022 as Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965. He has translated eleven essays by Yuri Andrukhovych for the award-winning publication My Final Territory: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is the translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022) and the editor, compiler, and a translator of Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin, 2023). His most recent translations are Taras Prokhasko’s Earth Gods: Writings from Before the War (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2025), for which he was one of three co-translators, and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Signals of Being or Berbum Caro Factum Est (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2025).

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese activist and bestselling writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She completed Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry manuscript written during COVID-19 quarantine, translated into English by Yasmine Seale and published by Action Books in March 2023. Rania has published two novels to great international acclaim, Green Flash and Son of the Sun, and Thirteen Months of Sunrise, a short story collection shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Rania just completed a short story collection in Arabic called A Lonely Woman under the Neem Tree, forthcoming for publication. Rania continues to organize for democracy in Sudan. Her writing has appeared in English, Korean, French, and Spanish translation. She is a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum since 2019.

Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, literary and film critic from Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies, and from 1992 to 2018, he wrote his works in Russian, was mainly published in Russia, and was considered a representative of Russian literature. Following the outbreak of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Volodymyr left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv, where he wrote Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Volodymyr learned Ukrainian from scratch and has dedicated himself to speaking Ukrainian, rather than Russian, his mother tongue, as an act of resistance and perseverance. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017). Volodymyr’s prose is full of phantasmagorical images and storylines, as well as explicit and implicit allusions to well-known texts. He is sometimes called the “magical postmodernist” due to the intertextuality and richness of his prose. He is a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum with his wife, Olesia Rafeyenko, since June 2023.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please visit OpenTable or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.