Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957) is the leading poet of the so-called “Fergana School”. Abdullaev has been awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his poetry (1994), the annual prize of the journal Znamia for his prose writings (1998), and the Russian Prize of the Boris Yeltsin Center (2006; also short-listed in 2014). In the fall of 2015, he was awarded a residency at the American Academy in Rome by the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund. Also in 2015, he participated in a Russian Poetry in Translation reading at Columbia University’s The Heyman Center for the Humanities. Translations of his other poems by Alex Cigale have appeared in Atlanta Review, Literary Imagination, The Manhattan Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Plume, The St. Petersburg Review, TriQuarterly, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today.