Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 30, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for an evening with Vera Pavlova. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
Vera Pavlova will read poems from the handwritten book “Poems on a Russian Passport,” translated by Lena Zinski, as well as poems from the cycle “Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album,” translated by Andrey Kneller.
Vera Pavlova was born in 1963, in Moscow (Russia). She is a graduate of the Schnittke College of Music and the Gnessin Academy of Music, where she specialized in history of music.To date, Pavlova has published twenty six collections of poetry in Russian, of which “Vezdes’” (“Here and Everywhere”), 2003, “Ruchnaya Klad’” (“Hand-Carried Luggage”), 2006, and “Pis’ma v sosedneyu komnatu” (“Letters to the Room Next Door”), 2006, were voted The Best Book of the Year. As of now, Pavlova’s poems have been translated into twenty six languages.
Pavlova has participated in art projects jointly with painters and authored five libretti of operas. She has also experimented with non-traditional ways of disseminating poetry, such as SMS-messaging, postcards, video clips, and audio books. The Kontent Media recording company has released seven audio books with Pavlova reading her selections from the works of renowned Russian poets. Stage productions based on Pavlova’s works are included in the repertoires of theatres in Moscow, Perm, St. Petersburg, and Toronto. Documentary films on Vera Pavlova have been released in Russia and the United States; she is also among the literary figures in documentaries covering contemporary Russian literature, filmed in Germany and France.
In the United States, Pavlova’s poems have appeared in Verse, Tin House, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and poetry magazines. One of her poems was selected by the Poetry in Motion program and was displayed as a poster in subway cars in New York City and in Los Angeles buses; it was also issued as a bookmark by the Poetry Society of America. That poem has served as the title of Pavlova’s first collection in English, IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE (Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, 2010), translated by her husband Steven Seymour. Her second collection in English, “Album for the Young (and Old)”, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2017.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
