Publishing-in-Transit: Ugly Duckling Presse

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.

Poet, translator, and editor, Matvei Yankelevich’s book include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square 2015), Alpha Donut (United Artists 2012), Boris by the Sea (Octopus 2009), Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook 2009), and, most recently, the chapbook From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia 2021). In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse, where he produced a variety of books, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, co-edited 6x6 magazine, and curated the Eastern European Poets Series. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Author of six books of poetry of which the most recent is Repetition Nineteen, published by Nightboat Books in the spring of 2020. Others include The Happy End/All Welcome—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika— as well as Public Domain. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has lived in NYC since mid-’90s and has published several books in Spanish, including Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women’s collective she formed with Gabriela Jauregui, Laureana Toledo, and the late Aura Estrada. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College and in the Bard MFA program. Recent work appears in Granta 151: Membranes and The Believer. The anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979, co-edited with Alex Balgiu, is just out from Primary Information.

Feminist avant-garde poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, and educator Rachel Levitsky is a founder of Belladonna* Collaborative. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute, Naropa University, and occasionally for Poets House and The Poetry Project. She was born in New York City and earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.