Women, Feminists, and Other Poets: A Series of Readings and Conversations

For the first installment of “Women, Feminists, and Other Poets: A Series of Readings and Conversations,” the Jordan Center will host Nastya Denisova, Kit Eginton, Anna Glazova, and Alex Niemi.

This April, the Jordan Center will host 6 contemporary Russian poets for a series of readings and conversations. With a view to the recent anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020), this series probes the recent history of women writing poetry in Russian. Whether explicitly feminist or otherwise, women have been prominent, if not dominant voices in Russian-language poetry for the past several decades. This series explores the power of language and its role in society, bringing together writing women of various generations and backgrounds to talk about their work, each other, and what it means to be a woman writing in Russian today. The series is organized by Professor Ainsley Morse and NYU PhD Candidate Rebekah Smith.

Nastya Denisova is a poet and artist from Saint Petersburg. She is the author of the books Ничего нет (Nechego Net) (2006), Вкл (Vkl) (2010), and трогали любили друг друга (trogali lyubili drug druga).

Kit Eginton is a poet, editor, translator of Russian verse, and occasional essayist. She is an editor at Hypocrite Reader, a leftist magazine of “useful, unexpected writing.” Her translations of Ekaterina Simonova and Nastya Denisova recently appeared in F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry. She is working on new translations and a long essay on the problems of revolutionary aesthetics called “Seeing What Happens.”

Anna Glazova is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. She was born in Dubna in 1973. She has studied and taught in Germany and the United States, where she defended her dissertation on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan. She has published six books of poetry: Пусть и вода [Even the Water] (2003), Петля. Невполовину [The Loop. Unhalved] (2008), Для землеройки [For the Shrew] (2013), Опыт сна [The Experience of Dreams] (2014), Земля лежит на земле [Earth Lies on the Earth] (2016), Лицевое счисление [Facial Calculation] (2020). She has translated the work of Unica Zürn, Robert Walser, and Franz Kafka; the theoretical texts of Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Werner Hamacher; and the poetry of Paul Celan. She won the Andrei Bely Prize for her poetry collection, For the Shrew. She currently lives in Hamburg.

Alex Niemi is a writer and translator from the French, Russian, and Spanish. Her recent work includes a translation of The John Cage Experiences by Vincent Tholomé (Autumn Hill Books, 2020), and she is the author of the poetry chapbook, Elephant (dancing girl press, 2020).

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.