Born in Kyiv, Russian Empire

Marya Zaturenska was born on September 12, 1902, in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Ukraine. She was born into a Jewish family, and her early childhood was shaped by the turbulence of the region, including the pogroms and social upheaval that led many Jewish families to emigrate from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

In 1909, when Marya was still a young child, her family emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City. This early transatlantic journey and the immigrant experience would later inform much of the emotional undercurrent in her lyric poetry, which often explored themes of loss, memory, and the search for beauty amid hardship.

Growing up in poverty on New York's Lower East Side, Zaturenska worked in factories as a child while attending public schools, and she taught herself English partly through voracious reading at public libraries. This formative period of hardship and self-education laid the foundation for her later academic and literary achievements, culminating in a Pulitzer Prize-winning career as one of America's notable twentieth-century lyric poets.