Yuriy Tarnawsky is a bilingual American/Ukrainian writer, born in Ukraine but raised in the West. He is a member of the avant-garde group of Ukrainian émigré authors The New York Group, Fiction Collective, and the Association of the Writers of Ukraine. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as a computer scientist and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University in New York City. His work has been the subject of a number of dissertations and monographs, and for his contribution to Ukrainian literature, in 2008, he was awarded the Prince Yaroslav the Wise Order of Merit by the Ukrainian Government. He resides in White Plains, NY.

Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored nineteen collections of poetry, seven plays, eight books of fiction, a biography, a number of articles dealing with literature, film, and theater, and numerous translations from and into Ukrainian. His play Not Medea was staged as a workshop production at the prestigious New York Mabou Mines Theater.