[New York, NY]

Polina Barskova, Alissa Heyman, and Matvei Yankelevich
December 22, 2010, 6:00 pm
at Cornelia Street Café

Polina Barskova, Alissa Heyman, and Matvei Yankelevich read as a part of the Perfect Sense Reading Series and St. Petersburg Review. In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad— now called St. Petersburg, as before—she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her seven books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College. She published a book of English translations of her poetry by Ilya Kaminsky, This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010). Her next book of translated poetry, The Zoo in Winter, is coming out from Melville House in 2011. Alissa Heyman selected, annotated, and edited The Best Poems of the English Language (Mud Puddle Books), a comprehensive collection of essential English language poetry. Her poems have appeared in Lyric and Quarto. Alissa received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a free-lance writer and editor living in New York City where she also co-curates the Perfect Sense poetry reading series. Matvei Yankelevich is the author of Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books). His translations from Russian have cropped up in Calque, Circumference, Harpers, New American Writing, Poetry, St. Petersburg Review, and the New Yorker and in various anthologies. His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook) and received praise from the TLS, the Guardian, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He edited a portfolio of Contemporary Russian Poetry and Poetics for the magazine Aufgabe (No. 8, Fall 2009) and has written essays on Russian-American poetry for Octopus magazine online. He teaches at Hunter College, Columbia University School of the Arts (Writing Division), and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. St. Petersburg Review is an annual independent, international journal of contemporary literature that seeks to support global connections and affinities through publishing quality fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama from writers of all countries.