Marina Temkina (left) and Elena Fanailova (right)

Thursday, February 4th at 7:00pm
The Russian Samovar, 256 West 52nd St.
Free admission. Please email akadysheva-yong@cecartslink.org to RSVP

CEC ArtsLink and Ugly Duckling Presse present a literary evening with two not-to-be-missed contemporary women poets. Elena Fanailova and Marina Temkina will read from their latest books (The Russian Version and What Do You Want?, respectively) and discuss their work, the political situation in post-Soviet Russia, and issues of identity with Michael Scammell, Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at Columbia University. A reception will follow the reading.

Elena Fanailova is a poet and journalist based in Moscow. Born in Voronezh, Central Russia, she is a graduate of the Voronezh Medical Institute and the Voronezh State University, where she majored in linguistics. Fanailova has worked as a doctor and as a university teacher. Currently, she is a host of the radio program Far from Moscow, which covers topics from the Beslan siege to new Russian prose for Radio Liberty. Fanailova’s poems have been published in leading literary magazines in Russia and abroad and are featured in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 2000). Fanailova is the author of four books and a winner of the Andrey Bely Award (1999) and the Moscow Score Award (2003). The Russian Version (UDP, 2009) is her first full-length collection in English translation. Elena Fanailova is an alumna of the Open World Cultural Leaders Program (2007)

Marina Temkina has published four books of poetry in Russian: Chasti chast’ (A Part of A Part), V obratnom napravlenii (In Reverse), Kalancha (Watchtower), and Canto Immigranto. In collaboration with Michel Gerard, she has published two artist’s books in France and is also the artist/author behind several multimedia poetry installations. Her work has been included in several international anthologies and poetry magazines. What Do You Want? (UDP, 2009) is Marina Temkina’s first book in English. She writes on gender, Russian-Jewish identity and immigration with a sense of history lived through and expressed as an intimate experience. Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad in 1948 and emigrated to New York City in 1978.

Michael Scammell is the Professor of Writing and Translation at Columbia University and the author of Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic and Solzhenitsyn: A Biography; he is also the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union. He has translated numerous books from Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. He is a Vice President of International PEN and past president of PEN American Center and recently co-founded the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University.

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective producing small to mid-size editions of new poetry, translations, lost works, and artists’ books.