Larissa Shmailo

Larissa Shmailo (born 1956 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic.

Shmailo is the daughter of Sinaida and Nikolai Shmailo, who emigrated to the United States in 1950 from the Ukraine via the displaced persons camps of World War II after internment in the Mitelbau Dora (Dora Northausen) concentration camp. Shmailo has recorded her parents' experience in her poem, "How My Family Survived the Camps" and in fictionalized form in her novel, Patient Women.

Shmailo was educated at New York City's Hunter High School, The American School in Switzerland, and Barnard College, although episodes of mental illness and substance abuse interrupted her studies. She was married in 1985 to Steven Charles Werner, who drowned on the couple's honeymoon, as recounted in Shmailo's poem "Death at Sea." Her second and third marriages to Hans Goldfuss in 1988 and Eric Yost in 2000 ended in divorce.

As a poet, Shmailo is known as an experimentalist and a neoformalist, as well as a spoken word artist. She translated Victory over the Sun at the age of twenty-two, but began her literary career in earnest in 1993 in New York City's open mike poetry scene as curator of the reading series Sliding Scale Poetry. She went on from there to win recognition as a poet, translator, and critic in Russia, India, and across the United States.

Victory over the Sun

Shmailo was the original translator of Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenych for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's celebrated reconstruction of the first Futurist opera and performance piece in 1980. This translation has been used for productions at the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Most recently, it was featured at the Cornelia Café with poet-actor Bob Holman in the role of The Time Traveler and was part of the Garage Museum of Moscow’s 2014 retrospective of Russian performative art. The “opera” received a high-tech full restaging with digital sets and synthesized music at Boston University on April 23, 2015.

Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry

Shmailo edited the free online anthology of ultra-contemporary Russian poetry, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. The anthology, which appeared in the online poetry omnibus Big Bridge in 2013, has been disseminated internationally via social media and e-mail.

HOWL (Humanities Opposition World League)

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