Press Release on September 18, 2017
Three Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund Fellows – poets Igor Bulatovsky and Ekaterina Sokolova, and artist Alisa Yoffe – are on their way to Rome and Venice for fall of 2017 residences in Italy
The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce our 2017 fellowships in poetry and visual arts. The fellows in poetry will be poets Igor Bulatovsky and Ekaterina Sokolova, and the fellow in visual arts will be artist Alisa Yoffe. The fellows will spend the fall and winter of 2017 in Rome and Venice as residents of the Fund’s partners – the American Academy in Rome and the Emily Harvey Foundation. They will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in these historic settings and work in the company of artists and scholars from around the world.
Igor Bulatovsky (b. 1971 in Leningrad), poet, author of seven books of poems, and participant in the New Storage Room literary project. A translator from French and Yiddish, Bulatovsky has rendered prose and poetry by Itzik Manger, Abraham Sutzkever, and Israel Joshua Singer into Russian. He has compiled a three-volume edition of Joseph Brodsky’s poems (2016) and a two-volume edition of the poems of Paul Verlaine (2014). In 2005 Igor Bulatovsky was awarded Hubert Burda Prize for Young Eastern European Poets, and in 2010 he was short listed for the Andrey Bely Award. He works at the Ivan Limbakh Publishing House in St Petersburg.
Ekaterina Sokolova (b. 1983 in Syktyvkar), poet. She graduated from the Department of Philology of the Syktyvkar State University. Ekaterina Sokolova is the author of four books of poems. Her poems are translated into English, Italian, French, Serbian, and Latvian. Poems translated into Italian were published in such anthologies of contemporary Russian poetry as “La massa critica del cuore” (2013) and “DisAccordi” (2016), and were included in the play, “Il cielo bianco sopra Youcali,” in San Marino (2017). A winner of the “Moskovsky Schet” Award (2014) and the Debut Literary Award (2009), she was also a finalist for thr LiteraturRoentgen Award (2008) and was short-listed for the Andrey Bely Award (2016). She lives and works in Moscow.
Alisa Yoffe (b. 1987 in Tashkent), artist. She studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2007–2008) and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s Free Workshops (2006–2007), and attended Anatoly Osmolovsky's lecture course (2008). Since 2008 Alisa Yoffe has been participating in numerous solo shows and group exhibitions, such as the Garage Triennial for Russian Contemporary Art, Lost in Translation – a collateral event of the 55th International Venice Biennale, the Third Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, the Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and the Fifth Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. Alisa Yoffe’s works are in the collections of the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia; the Stella Art Foundation, Russia; the V-A-C Foundation, Russia; the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantine Sorokin Foundation, Russia; Horvath Art Foundation, Hungary; and the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, Lithuania. She lives and works in Moscow.
Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel Laureate in Literature and a distinguished poet and essayist. In 1995 he approached the mayor of Rome to urge the creation of a Russian Academy there. This would bring Russian artists, writers, and scholars to join their colleagues from other countries who had, for centuries, sought inspiration in that ancient city. Joseph Brodsky reminded the mayor of the seventy-year gap in a cherished collaboration between their two countries, and urged that the Russian Academy could become the source of its renaissance.
The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund was founded in the days after Brodsky´s death by a group of his friends in order to continue this effort in his memory. In 2000 the first poetry fellows travelled as Brodsky Fellows to Italy. In 2002 the visual art fellowship was launched. Twenty-six poets and visual artists have been lived and work in Italy as Fellows of the Brodsky Fund. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is a non-profit organization supported by individual donors and independent foundations. The Fund is very grateful to all its donors for their help in fulfilling its mission.