Evening with Maria Stepanova

Joseph Brodsky Fund's friends gathered for an evening of poetry and conversation with Maria Stepanova, 2010 Brodsky Poetry Fellow.

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist, an author of nine poetry collections and a recipient of several Russian and international literary awards. Among her most notable works are a book of post-modern ballads, Songs of the Northern Southerners (Pesni severnykh iuzhan, ARGO-RISK, 2001) and a book-length narrative poem, John Doe’s Prose (Proza Ivana Sidorova, NLO, 2008). Her poems have been translated into numerous languages including English, Italian, German, French, Hebrew.

Since 2007, apart from publishing as a poet and essayist, she became the founder and editor-in-chief of an independent online journal OpenSpace.ru, Russia’s main daily online edition covering cultural issues. Later she reconfigured it as the crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru. From July 2012 COLTA.RU exists solely on public donations and writes about cultural, social and political reality of the contemporary Russia, gathering an audience of 700 000 unique visitors per month.

Apart form poetry, Stepanova is currently working on a documentary novel (a family chronicle of five generations) and a collection of essays on photography.