“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.”
― Simone Weil

Konstantin Kulakov (he/they) is a poet, editor, and translator born in Zaoksky, former Soviet Union. His collection Excavating the Sky was published by Dialogue Foundation Books in 2015. They are the recipient of the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, judged by Brian Teare, and served as a Writing Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School between 2019 and 2021. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Witness, Spillway, Phoebe, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, and Loch Raven Review, among others. They hold an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary and an MFA from Naropa University.

The grandson of Soviet pastor and Gulag survivor Mikhail P. Kulakov, Konstantin considers the relationship between ethics and aesthetics central to his work. Between 2016 and 2017, they served as a founding member of THE WATERISTS, a New York City-based, interdisciplinary art collective that performed at churches, schools, and art galleries. In 2018, a series of their poems Holy Radiators was set to music by composer Toby Twining and recorded with John Bellemer at Pogo Studio in Nashville, Tennessee. His libretto Evelyn/Evelyn was performed at Green Space in Queens by Ensemble Intertwining and produced for film by Eugene Simonov. He co-founded and edits Pocket Samovar, an international literary magazine committed to underrepresented post-Soviet writing, art, and diaspora.