PRESS RELEASE
March 31, 2008

We are very pleased to announce our poetry fellowship for 2010 to be granted by the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund. The new fellow will be poet Maria Stepanova.

Maria Stepanova was born June, 9, 1972, in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow Literary Institute (1995). Her works have been published in numerous magazines including “Zerkalo”, “Znamya”, “Kriticheskaya massa”, “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozreniye”, etc. Stepanova is the author of seven poetry collections. She won the «Znamya» magazine prize in 1993, the Pasternak Prize in 2005, the Andrey Bely Prize in 2005, the Hubert Burda Fund Prize (Germany) for new eastern European literature in 2006, and the Big Moscow Score Prize in 2009. Her poems have been translated into English, Hebrew, Italian, German, Finnish, French and other languages.

The poetics of Maria Stepanova, at once contemporary and timeless, disproves the notion that there is a crisis of in traditional prosody. Stepanova experiments with the authenticity of the author’s utterance, applying the author’s idiosyncrasies to a poetic persona. It’s not only a figure of speech for her, but an act of a personal will, an attempt to break through to the subject. Stepanova’s poetic language is very distinctive: word forms pass through deformation on every level, bringing new senses, both actual and potential, to light.

She will serve a one and a half month fellowship in Rome and Venice during the fall of the year 2010.

Ms. Stepanova’s fellowship is made possible by a generous gift from Mr. George Rohr, president of New Century Holdings Company and founder of Rohr Family Foundation and Mr. Nahum Guzik, president of Guzik Technical Enterprises.

Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is also pleased to announce the publication of an anthology of the works of former Brodsky Fund fellows this spring (“New Literary Review” Publishing House, Moscow), edited by Claudia Scandura of the University of Rome.

Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel laureate in literature and a distinguished poet in his native Russia as well as his second home in the West. In the fall of 1995 he made an appeal to the mayor of Rome that a Russian Academy in Rome be established, to allow Russian artists, writers, and scholars periods of work and study in Italy. He urged that seventy years of isolation under communist rule had broken a much older tradition of cultural exchange between Russia and her European neighbors; he wished to revive this tradition with the creation of an independent academy devoted to literature, culture, and scholarship. As he wrote to the mayor, "Italy was a revelation to the Russians; now it can become the source of their renaissance."

When he died in 1996 his vision was taken up by a group of his friends, who set up foundations in the US and Italy to realize it.

The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is funded by private donation and independent foundations. We are most grateful to our donors for giving Mr. Brodsky's vision this continuing life.

For more information, please contact:
Ann Kjellberg, New York
(212) 645 3346