Matvei Yankelevich (CRF 2021) shared his recent news and upcoming events with us.
A translation of Osip Mandelstam’s 1937 poem, “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” by John High and Matvei appeared recently in The New Yorker. This strange and epic anti-war poem resonates perhaps too well with our times. Their translations of some more Mandelstam poems from that period are up at Talisman.
A review of Matvei’s recent chapbook Dead Winter (Fonograf Editions, 2022) is up at ZYZZYVA.
On April 7 at 6:30pm, Matvei will read poems with Basie Allen and Sarah Matthes (CRF 2021) at the Aftermath series curated by Chuks Ndule at Black Spring Books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Details here.
On April 24 from 4–7pm, Matvei will join friends and family of the poet Lewis Warsh at a memorial event at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, to give voice to Lewis’s poems. Register for in-person attendance here or view the real time livestream here.
Matvei recently assumed the position of Editor at World Poetry Books — a small press that publishes only poetry in translation. We heartily recommend to you one of their recent titles, Jerzy Ficowski’s Everything I Don’t Know, translated from Polish by Jennifer Grotz (CRF 2021) & Piotr Sommer (CRF 2007), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Matvei recently returned from Milwaukee where he participated in Woodland Pattern’s Jewish Literary Sabbath with a host of excellent poets: you can watch the recordings of readings and roundtables on Crowdcast (select sessions in the upper left corner).
This Saturday, April 2, Matvei will speak with Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Greene, and Jonathan Flatley about race in Soviet media images, vis-a-vis an exhibition at Amherst College based on The Wayland Rudd Collection, the last book he edited for Ugly Duckling Presse.
On April 11 at 2pm, he will speak on an in-person panel at Columbia on publishing East European writing, part of a day-long event with Maria Stepanova, with a reading (in-person and virtual). Information and registration can be found here. Later this month, Matvei will be participating in a conference on Cinema and Poetry at the University of Maryland on April 21 and 22.