Award Winning Author Vasyl Shklair is touring the U.S and visited Ukrainian Community in Western New York, stopped at Ukrainian Cultural Center Dnipro and Ukrainian American Civic Center in Blackrock on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 to speak at a scheduled Lecture Events to discuss his award winning literary work "Chornyj Voron".

At a recent award ceremony, Vasyl Shkliar gave Ukrainian President Yanukovych the \"screw you\" signal upon Yanukovych\'s personal presentation of the literary award to Shkliar, including a quarter million dollar cash prize. Shkliar\'s refusal of the award was in protest of Yanukovych\'s political policies. Shkliar specifically despises the anti-Ukrainian culture policies of current Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk. Vasyl Shkliar spent the last twenty years browsing through archives, traveling to Kholodny Yar, communicating with witnesses of that time, and writing his novel Black Raven, whose characters are versatile and unformatted. Shkliar is called a radical and prides himself in calling things by their proper names. Ukrainians are are just starting to recall the events in Kholodny Yar of the 1920's. Black Raven is the first fiction novel about these events. It encourages people to begin learning about the history of early 20th century Ukraine and the documented inaccuracies plus irreparable mistakes tied to it.