Translation Reading and Conversation with Ainsley Morse UC San Diego, Tamizdat Project)

Please join us for a conversation with and a reading by Ainsley Morse, professor of Slavic literatures at the University of California San Diego and the driving force behind Tamizdat Project’s English-language titles, including Abram Tertz’s Pkhentz (2024), Linor Goralik’s Exodus-22 (2025) and others. Ainsley is also the author of Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2021), which traces the history of a “childlike aesthetic” from early modernist experimentation through Soviet utopian visions and censorship, and into the strange partnership of children’s and underground literature.

As a literary translator, she has published Permanent Evolution, a collection of theoretical essays by the Formalist critic Yuri Tynianov (ASP; edited and co-translated with Philip Redko); the Yugoslav surrealist-Marxist Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang (with Aleksandar Bošković, Brill 2022); the Odesan poet Maria Galina’s Communiqués (with Anna Halberstadt, Cicada Press 2024); and the novels of early Leningrad modernist Konstantin Vaginov (with Geoff Cebula, NYRB Classics, 2025). With Galina Rymbu and Eugene Ostashevsky, she also edited the anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020), and she was poetry translations editor for Ukrainian Soviet Modernism: Texts and Contexts (ed. Babak, Ilchuk, Ustinov; ASP, 2025).

Admission: $10.

And a small but important reminder: our event space is very small, so the number of seats is limited. We recommend purchasing your tickets in advance to make sure you can join us.