Larissa Shmailo (born 1956 in Brooklyn, New York, United States) is an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic.
Shmailo was the original English-language translator of Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenykh for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's celebrated reconstruction of the first Futurist opera and performance piece in 1980.
[3][7] In 2015, it was featured at the Cornelia Street 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 work is a semiautobiographical bildungsroman about sex and substance addiction in the Woodstock and punk rock eras and the early days of AIDS, and features a transgender leading character.
[1][17][18] Sly Bang is an experimental science fiction non-linear novel, including prose and poetry, that pits Shmailo's alter ego, “Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayevna Romanova, tsaritsa of all the Russias,” against an “army of serial killers, mad scientists, and ultrarich sociopaths.” Critics cite its "humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios.
[22][23] Shmailo has presented at the Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs several times, presenting "Daughters of Baba Yaga: The Eastern European Woman Poet in the United States" and "Translation from Pushkin to Pussy Riot" in 2015,[24] "Endangered Music: Formal Poetry in the 21st Century" in 2016,[25] and "The Semi-formal: Hybrid Free and Formal Verse" in 2018.
Shmailo has written on Daniil Kharms, Bob Holman, Annie Finch, Elaine Equi, Philip Nikolayev, and other poets and writers for the Journal of Poetics Research, The Battersea Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Jacket.
[35] Chris Campanioni praised Shmailo's book #specialcharacters and its anti-capitalism themes in the Brooklyn Rail, placing it between Millennials thought and Language poetry.
[36] Writing for Lit Pub, Dean Kostos thoroughly analyzed Medusa's Country, discussing its "prosody and nuanced rhymes," as well as how the author's personal life and her "bouts with mental illness, mania, and deleterious behaviors" inspire her work.
Shmailo has written extensively about her history with bipolar disorder, cross-addictions, and prostitution, particularly in her poem, "autobio," her novel, Patient Women, and her book of poetry, Medusa's Country.