Konstantin Kulakov is a Russian-Moldovan-American poet, editor, and translator born in Zaoksky, former Soviet Union. He is the recipient of the Greg Grummer Poetry Award judged by Brian Teare and holds a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Kulakov’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Spillway, phoebe, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, Tahoma Literary Review, Passengers Journal, Ghost Town, and Loch Raven Review, among others. His debut collection of poems, Excavating the Sky, was published by Dialogue Foundation Books in 2015 and lauded by Kirkus Reviews and The Christian Century. Select poems have been translated into Russian and Spanish, including a forthcoming translation into German.
The grandson of Soviet pastor and gulag survivor Mikhail P. Kulakov, spirituality and the relationship between ethics and aesthetics are an indispensable part of Konstantin’s work. In the summer of 2016, as Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church, he launched an eclectic panel on Art and Activism, featuring Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Amin Husain, Sarah Browning, Rev. Micah Bucey, Rev. Je Exodus Hooper, Elz Cuya Jones, Alfonse Borysewicz, Natasha Johnson, and Mariame Kaba. He also served as poet in the art collective, THE WATERISTS, performing multimedia collaborations with composer Toby Twining, painter Alfonse Borysewicz, dancer Darla Stanley, and tenor John Bellemer in houses of worship, art galleries, and schools. In 2018, a series of his Advent poems, Holy Radiators, was set to music by Twining and recorded with Bellemer at Pogo Studios in Nashville, TN.
