Ainsley Morse & Bela Shayevich (The Nekrasov Readings) at Melville House

Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. A longtime student of both literatures, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Slavic literatures at Harvard University. Recent publications include Andrei Sen-Senkov’s Anatomical Theater (translated with Peter Golub, Zephyr Press, 2013). Ongoing translation projects include prose works by Georgii Ball and Viktor Ivaniv and polemical essays by the great Yugoslav writer Miroslav Krleža.Bela Shayevich is a writer, translator, and illustrator living in Chicago. Her translations have appeared in It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev (UDP/n+1, 2012) and various periodicals including Little Star, St. Petersburg Review, and Calque. She was the editor of n+1 magazine’s translations of the Pussy Riot closing statements.Genya Turovskaya’s original poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, 6×6, Aufgabe, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Jacket, and other publications. She is the author of the chapbooks, Calendar, The Tides, and New Year’s Day. She is the co-translator of two books of poetry, Red Shifting by Aleksandr Skidan (2008) and The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova (2010), both published by UDP. She is also an associate editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at UDP.Keith Gessen is a novelist, critic, translator, and one of the founding editors of n + 1. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 2008). His translations include Voices from Chernobyl (Dalkey, 2005), Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (co-translated with Anna Summers, Penguin, 2009), and Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good (co-translated with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich).Cement is a translation collective of young writers and academics specializing in Russian and other Slavic languages, and interested in the cultural legacies of the Second World. Loosely formed in 2012, the group has focused mostly on poetry and politics. Members choose a text, find partners, and work collectively to translate and edit work that would be otherwise unavailable and often too long and daunting to handle alone. The translators of Cement have worked on the closing statements of the Pussy Riot trial (published with n+1: http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements); documents and public letters for the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD); and poetry from Mayakovsky to the recent issue of the St. Petersburg journal Translit.More info here:http://thebridgeseries.org/