Book Launch Party for Medusa's Country

An all-star reading to celebrate Larissa Shmailo's new book, Medusa's Country, with

Larissa Shmailo’s newest book of poetry is Medusa's Country (MadHat). Larissa’s work appears in Measure for Measure (Everyman's Library / Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Perigee / Penguin Putnam), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press). Larissa translated Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's reconstruction of the first Futurist opera; the libretto has been used for productions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian, and the Garage Museum of Moscow. Larissa edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and has also been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. Larissa's other poetry collections are #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press), and Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks). Her novel is Patient Women (BlazeVox) and her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew).

Lee Ann Brown  is the author of Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stephane Bouquet as Autre Archere (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015),  In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France, and the Howard Foundation. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry.

Tim Fitts lives and works in Philadelphia.  Fitts is the author of Hypothermia, a collection of short stories, and The Soju Club.  His stories have been published by The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Xavier Review, among others.  He teaches in the Liberal Arts Department at The Curtis Institute of Music and serves on the editorial staff of The Painted Bride Quarterly.

Ron Kolm is a member of the Unbearables. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of The Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Duke & Jill and Night Shift. A new collection of his poetry, A Change in the Weather, has just been published by Sensitive Skin. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Public Illumination Magazine, Local Knowledge and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.

 Dean Kostos’s forthcoming poetry collection is Pierced by Night-Colored Threads. His books include This Is Not a Skyscraper (recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty), Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and Celestial Rust. He edited Mama’s Boy and Pomegranate Seeds (its debut reading was held at the United Nations). His work has appeared in over 300 journals, including The Bangalore Review, Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine, Western Humanities Review, and on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com. He presented a paper and his poems at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator. She has authored eight books of poetry in Russian; her most recent collections are Volk [Wolf] (Moscow: NLO, 2009) and Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel] (New York: Ailuros Publishing, 2013). Irina Mashinski's work has appeared in Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek, The London Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin, 2015), as well as co-founder and editor of the literary journal Storony Sveta, and co-editor of the journal Cardinal Points. She received First Prizes in the Russian America (2001) and Maximilian Voloshin (2003) poetry competitions, and First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.

Born in Hong Kong, Marc Vincenz is British-Swiss and has published nine collections of poetry; his latest are Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Books, 2015) and Sibylline (Ampersand Books, 2016).  He is the translator of many German- French- and Romanian-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz, Prix Goncourt winner, Jacques Chessex and Ion Monoran. His most recent book of translations is Lifelong Bird Migration by Jurg Amann (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).  He is Coeditor of Fulcrum and Plume, publisher of MadHat Press and Plume Editions, and lives and writes in the Berkshires.