Matvei Yankelevich

Co-founder, Editor

Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, editor, and translator. His books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square Editions), Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and the chapbooks Dead Winter (Fonograf) and From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia). His poems can be found online at Brooklyn Rail, Bomb, Caesura, Iterant, A Perfect Vacuum , and Prelude, as well as in many other print and online journals.. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis), and co-translator (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received the 2014 National Translation Award. He has contributed translations to several anthologies including Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky (FSG), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive), and curated a portfolio of contemporary Russian poetry and poetics for Aufgabe #8. His co-translations (with John High) of Osip Mandelstam’s late poetry have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Circumference, among other magazines.

Matvei started publishing the Ugly Duckling zine in 1993 and co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse in the late 1990s, where he edited and designed books, periodicals, and ephemera for more than twenty years, and served on UDP’s editorial collective continually until 2022. During his time at UDP, Matvei founded and curated the Eastern European Poets Series (f. 2002), co-edited The Emergency Gazette (1998-2001) and 6×6 magazine (2000-2017), and managed the publication of Emergency Index (2010-2020). He served several years as co-executive director and as a member of the Working Collective in the positions of managing editor and production manager.

Matvei has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Dora Maar House, and Civitella Ranieri. He has taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa), Hunter College, Colorado College, Long Island University, and Wesleyan University, and was a member of the Writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (2009-2019). He has given talks on publishing, on translation, and on Russian poetry at numerous colleges and universities, including keynote speeches at several conferences. A suite of Matvei’s essays on small press history and politics can be found at Harriet.

As of 2022, Matvei is the editor-in-chief of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts (/Writing), where he has taught courses on translation, book arts, small press history, and poetry since 2009.