Ivan Sokolov is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar from St. Petersburg, Russia, currently based in Berkeley. Author of five books of poetry in Russian; in English, two poems translated by Elina Alter are available in an anthology from Deep Vellum, Verses on the Vanguard. Finalist of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Award for Emerging Poets (2016). Russian translations of G. M. Hopkins and a broad range of American poetry, from the New York School and the San Francisco Renaissance to the Language Poets and beyond. Ongoing translation projects include Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, The Tennis-Court Oath by John Ashbery and I Remember by Joe Brainard. English translations of poetry by Natalia Azarova (Trafika Europe, 2018), Dima Gerchikov (Punctured Lines, 2022), and Aleksandr Skidan (World Literature Today, 2023). Contributing editor at GRIOZA, where in 2020 he curated an international festschrift for the centenary of Paul Celan. In 2021, a bilingual performance with US poets, “Off with the Top of Their Head!," was broadcast by Globus Books, SF, and a reading with Petersburg queer writer Aleksandr Ilianen, “Resisting Marginality,” was hosted by Swarthmore College.
Sokolov translated “A Tea Table’s Progress Toward Decline,” by Stanislav Snytko, for The Back Room.
