Matvei Yankelevich

b. 1973
23 January 2009 Matvei Yankelevich, founder of Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, New York, speaks with new employee Katherine Wilson on her first day on the job. (

Matvei Yankelevich's books include the long poem Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt, the poetry collection Alpha Donut, and the novella in fragments Boris by the Sea. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms and co-translator (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of the National Translation Award-winning An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities. He is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and has curated UDP's Eastern European Poets Series since 2002. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University's School of the Arts and is a member of the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.