Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor. His books include the poetry collections Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists) and, most recently, Dead Winter (Fonograf), as well as the translations Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook) and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets; with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the 2014 National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and Civitella Ranieri. In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse where he produced a variety of books, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, co-edited 6×6 magazine, and curated the Eastern European Poets Series. As of 2022, he is the editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation. In the spring of this year, he founded the literary small press Winter Editions. He has written and lectured on the history and politics of small press publishing, on translation, and on various subjects in Russian Literature. He teaches translation at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
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