Dmitry Kuzmin

Dmitry Kuzmin (1968, Moscow) is a Russian-language poet and publisher who moved to Latvia for political reasons in 2014. Translations of Kuzmin’s poems into English have appeared in A Public Space, Habitus, Aufgabe, Fulcrum, The Brooklyn Rail, Big Bridge, Zymbol and other journals, and were anthologized in Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature, Crossing Centuries: The New Wave in Russian Poetry (Gay Sunshine Press) and The Poetry of Men’s Lives: An International Anthology (University of Georgia Press). In 1996, Kuzmin founded Vavilon, an online poetry platform, which for many years served as the go-to source for new Russian-language poetry as well as the poetry of unofficial poets of the 1970s and 1980s whose books the site has archived in copious quantities. His important work as an editor and promoter of Russian-language poetry was acknowledged with an Andrei Bely award for Merit in Literature (2002). Apart from his central role as an editor and promoter of younger Russian poets, Kuzmin is also known as a literary scholar, critic, and anthologist. He is the author of a monograph on one-line poems and has curated several anthologies including the first Russian anthology of prose poems and an international anthology of AIDS-related poems in Russian translation. He is the editor and publisher of the publishing projects ARGO-RISK (in Russia) and Literature Without Borders (in Latvia), as well as the print poetry magazine Vozdukh. He has published two poetry collections in Russia, as well as a volume of selected poems in Ukrainian translation. His translations of English-language poetry into Russian include e.e. cummings, Charles Simic, and CK Williams. He has taught poetry and translation at Princeton University and elsewhere.