standoff – Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Teaching Genocide in ELA classrooms, with Russia’s current war on Ukraine as the focus.

After writing the Kidnapped from Ukraine trilogy over a frenzied 17 months, I tried to take a break from writing in 2025. I did manage to not write fiction, but ended up writing book contributions and other non-fiction things, including chapter four, “Crafting Historical Fiction: Rehumanizing Global Crises Through Character Development” in Sarah J. Donovan’s upcoming book, Teaching Genocide and Holocaust Education in ELA Classrooms: Language to Remember, Witness, and Repair.

I selected Russia’s current war on Ukraine as my genocide focus, and the rehumanizing of the victim exercise uses a scene from Standoff as a launching point.

Nice lists for Standoff

Thank you, Barbra Hesson of the Calgary Herald for including Standoff in your June picks! Thank you also, to the Canadian Children’s Book Center for selecting Standoff in the Best Books selection for spring 2026.

Trilogy now available!

Standoff: Video presentation

On Dec 4th, I did a zoom presentation for the Lecture Series sponsored by the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba. Here’s the recording. Many thanks to CUCS!

#OLASC 2026 — Signing for Standoff

The Ontario Library Association’s annual Superconference is one of my favourite places to be! It’s an opportunity to meet up with my fellow authors in the flesh. We see each other a lot, but it’s usually virtually! It’s also of course fantastic to chat with librarians and teacher-librarians. No one supports books and authors more than librarians and educators.

Also, it’s just so utterly fun to walk around the tradeshow and snap pics of my friends. Authors are invariably by nature introverted so we all do what we can to promote each other. Take a look at all the friends I ran into just in half a day! I actually ran into more than this, but couldn’t always take pics.