Nikita Nelin

Story Weaver

Fiction.

Nonfiction..

Immersive Journalism…

Narrative Guide….

The Obligatory Bio in the 3rd-person:

Nikita Nelin was born in Moscow, Russia and immigrated to the U.S in 1989. He has lived in Austria and Italy, and has traveled the U.S extensively. He received the Sean O’Faolain prize for short fiction, the Summer Literary Seminars prize for nonfiction, and the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, as well as being chosen as a finalist for the Restless Books Immigrant prize and the Dzanc Books prize. His work has been published in print and online. Nikita has conducted research through the Harriman Institute as well as translation through Yale Press, and has written on the convergence between fringe and at-large cultural trends for the Hannah Arendt Center. He holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, is a 2019 Associate Fellow at The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, and is a member of the Southern Experience Collective.

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04/15/20 Let’s Talk About Taxes…

Let’s assume everything is dangerous:

words on a chalkboard

from my ear

to your mouth;

an impersonal hello

taken as a signature in parting;

someone else’s carelessness

with your life;

a book I burned on Christmas

as an offering

to the recent

most popular

God,

who stares at us from a distance

as we conjure reasons

for a most ordinary of magic

tricks –

a lottery.

Where were you when the music

stopped,

and you learned that even your eyes

were an accident,

on the other side of which

is the dark?

Where were you

when you had to choose between love

and surrender?

Was your birth order

just too precious

to receive

the gift

of sight?

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels." 
                                                                                     Goya