A Reading by Eugene Ostashevsky and Zarina Zabrisky

Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979. Lives mostly in New York and Berlin, where he writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and macaronicism. His second book of poetry, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages. As poet, he has been granted awards by the Fund for Poetry, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). As scholar and translator of Russian avant-garde poetry, especially by the 1930s underground writers Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, he has received the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the NEA, the PEN/Heim, and other translation prizes. He has had his librettos for contemporary classical music performed in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Ostashevsky will read from and discuss his current project, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, that contemplates communication challenges faced by pirates and parrots. 

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of three short story collections including EXPLOSION,  and a novel WE, MONSTERS. Leaving Russia in 1998, Zabrisky started to publish in English in 2011. Since then her work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Nepal. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, editor nomination for the 2012 Million Writers Award, and honorable mention for the New Millennium Writings.  She was a finalist in the Normal School Prize in Fiction, 2012, and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award for Achievement in The Avant Garde. Zabrisky is a co-founder of The Arts Resistance, a collective resisting the war and injustice through the means of the arts. She is based in San Francisco.

In Zabrisky's work, "the brutality and urgency of the subject matter is presented in flights of gorgeous prose."

--Guernica

The Russian American Cultural Center, 520 East 76 Street # 7E New York, NY 10021

646-831-0554, russculture@aol.com; www.russianamericanculture.com

http://www.poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/other-events/literary-partners-program-reading-eugene-ostashevsky-and-zarina

This event made possible through Poets House’s Literary Partners Program. 

RACC's events are made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the city Council, and Tianaderrah Foundation.