ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Polina Barskova is a Saint Petersburg–born poet, prose writer, and scholar. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She has authored ten collections of poems in Russian; three collections in English translation, This Lamentable City (2010), The Zoo in Winter (2010), and Relocations (2013); and a collection of short stories in Russian, The Living Pictures (2014), for which she was awarded the Andrey Bely Prize (2015). She is an editor of the anthology Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (2016) and coeditor of a collection of scholarly articles, in Russian, The Narratives in Blockade (2017). She has authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (forthcoming in 2017). Barskova teaches at Hampshire College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Uilleam Blacker is a lecturer in comparative culture of Eastern Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research covers the literatures and cultures of Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. His translations of the work of contemporary Ukrainian writers—including Sofia Andrukhovych, Taras Prokhasko, Taras Antypovych, and Lina Kostenko—have appeared in Words Without Borders, in the Dalkey Archive Best European Fiction series, and in the journal Ukrainian Literature in Translation. He is also a member of the UK-based Ukrainian theatre group Molodyi Teatr London.

Alex Cigale’s own English-language poems have appeared in such journals as the Colorado Review, The Common Online, and The Literary Review, and his translations of Russian Silver Age and contemporary poets in Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, TriQuarterly, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today. In 2015, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation for his work on the St. Petersburg philological school poet Mikhail Eremin, and guest-edited the Spring 2015 Russia Issue of the Atlanta Review, writing about it for Best American Poetry. His first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings is just out in the Northwestern University Press World Classics series. From 2011 to 2013, he was an assistant professor at the American University of Central Asia, and more recently, a lecturer in Russian literature at CUNY/Queens College.

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from UCLA. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, and other publications. He is the translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including, most recently, Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and coeditor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). His website is bdralyuk.wordpress.com.

Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls (Marick, 2011), which combines prose poetry, fairy tale, riddle, myth, and drawings. She has contributed translations to books of Russian, French, and Chinese poetry, including This Lamentable City (Tupelo, 2010) and New Cathay (Tupelo, 2013). She teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and in New England College’s low-residency MFA program.

Tatiana Filimonova is a native of Saint Petersburg, Russia. She received a PhD in Slavic languages and literature from Northwestern University and has taught Russian language, literature, and culture at Northwestern, Vanderbilt University, and the College of Wooster. As a scholar of contemporary Russian literature, Tatiana’s research lies at the intersection of literature, history, and contemporary politics. She has a special interest in empire studies, Eurasianism, nationalism, regionalism, and postmodernism. Tatiana has published articles on contemporary Russian writers such as Vladimir Sorokin and Pavel Krusanov, as well as on contemporary film.

Sibelan Forrester has translated poetry from Croatian, Russian, and Serbian, including most recently work by Maria Stepanova, Marianna Geide, and Dmitri Prigov. She has made conference presentations on the stories of Marko Vovchok, and is a past president of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. She teaches Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College.

Amelia M. Glaser is an associate professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of California San Diego, where she currently directs the Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program, the Jewish studies program, and Alchemy, an online journal of student translation. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (Northwestern University Press, 2012), the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), and the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015).

Bob Holman, who wrote the introduction to Serhiy Zhadan’s book of selected poems in English (What We Live For, What We Die For, Yale University Press, 2018) is a poet, professor (currently at Princeton), and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club. He often appears on stage with Yara Arts Group.

Yuliya Ilchuk is an assistant professor of Slavic literatures at Stanford University. She earned her BA in Russian as a foreign language from National Pedagogical University in Kyiv (Ukraine), MA in comparative literature from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of Southern California. Her major research interests fall under the broad heading of cultural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. She has published articles on the topics of postcolonial theory and criticism, institutions of authorship, reading culture, protest art, and post-Soviet identity. Currently, she is working on a book project, titled Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybridity.

Andrew Janco is a digital scholarship librarian at Haverford College. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. With Olga Livshin, he has translated a number of Russian and Ukrainian poets. His translations are published in Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology and several journals.

Olena Jennings’s collection of poetry Songs from an Apartment was released in January 2017 by Underground Books. Her translations of poetry from Ukrainian can be found in Chelsea, Poetry International and Wolf. She has published fiction in Joyland, Pioneertown, and Projectile. She completed her MFA in writing at Columbia and her MA focusing in Ukrainian literature at the University of Alberta.

Mary Kalyna is the daughter of post–World War II Ukrainian refugees. A lifelong social justice activist, she organized events in Philadelphia in support of the Maidan. A graduate of Cornell University with an MBA from the Wharton School, she is a writer and researcher whose current focus is documenting the experience of Ukrainian forced laborers in Nazi Germany.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press) which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry Magazine. Dancing in Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship. Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Recently, he was on the short list for Neusdadt International Literature Prize. His anthology of twentieth-century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published by HarperCollins in March 2010. Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center, and, more recently, as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California. He is a professor of poetry at San Diego State University.

Maria Khotimsky teaches Russian language and literature and supervises the Russian language program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has received her PhD from the department of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University in 2011. Her research focuses on the history and theory of poetic translation in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and on the cross-influences between translation and original writing. She has published several articles devoted to the poetics of translation, and she is a contributor and coeditor of an anthology of scholarly articles devoted to Olga Sedakova’s poetry: Olga Sedakova: Stikhi, Smysly, Prochteniia. Sbornik Nauchnykh Statei (Moscow: NLO, 2016).

Ostap Kin published work in The Common, Poetry International, St. Petersburg Review, Springhouse, Trafika Europe, Ohio Edit, and in anthologies. He has edited the anthology New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poetry on the City (forthcoming with Academic Studies Press). Kin lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, where he is the editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal. He has published four collections of his poetry, the latest being Horizon (Red Moon Press, 2016), and three novels (the latest title is DisUNITY [Glagoslav, 2013]). His anthology of Russian poetry in English translation, A Night in the Nabokov Hotel, appeared in 2006; his anthology of German-language poetry in English translation, Coloured Handprints, in 2015; both have been published by Dedalus Press. He edited two anthologies of Irish haiku, Bamboo Dreams (Doghouse, 2012) and Between the Leaves (Arlen House, 2016). He has also published his English translations from Tomas Tranströmer, Miron Białoszewski, and a few other poets. In 2003, he won the Maria Edgeworth poetry prize. In 2016, one of his poems has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The American Journal of Poetry. He also was the recipient of multiple international awards for his haiku.

Svetlana Lavochkina is a novelist, poet and translator, born and educated in Ukraine, and currently residing in Leipzig, Germany. In 2013, her novella “Dam Duchess” was chosen runner-up in the Paris Literary Prize launched by Shakespeare & Company and the De Groot Foundation. Her debut novel, a historical burlesque, Zap, was shortlisted for Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize 2015 in London and will be published in the United States in 2017. Svetlana’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the United States and UK, including AGNI, New Humanist, Poem, Eclectica, Straylight, Circumference, Superstition Review, Witness, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, The Literary Review, Chamber Four Fiction Anthology, and elsewhere. Her experimental mono-musical, “Tumbleweed,” scored by Patrick Flanagan, was broadcast on Radio Blau in May.

Olga Livshin is an English-language poet, essayist, and literary translator. Born in Odesa and raised in Moscow, she came to the United States as a teenager with her family. Her work has been recognized by the CALYX journal’s Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, the Poets & Patrons Chicagoland Contest, the Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry Project, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize (twice). Her poetry and translations are published in International Poetry Review, Blue Lyra, and Mad Hatters’ Review, among others, and are included in Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, The Anthology of Chicago, and The Persian Anthology of World Poetry (in Persian translation). Livshin holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literature and has taught Russian at Boston University and Swarthmore College. She lives in the Philadelphia area with her partner Andrew Janco and their little son.

Oksana Lushchevska is a writer and translator. She is an author of children’s and young adult books written in Ukrainian. Oksana received her BA in Ukrainian language and literature, English language and literature, and world literature from the Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University. She completed a master’s degree in Russian and comparative literature and a graduate certificate in children’s literature from the Pennsylvania State University. Oksana studied for a PhD degree in education and taught children’s literature courses at the University of Georgia. Oksana is a cofounder of “Kazkarka,” now part of Chytomo literary website. She is also an initiator of “A Step Ahead: Becoming Global with Ukrainian-English Bilingual Picturebooks” project, aimed at publishing and promoting quality bilingual children’s books. Oksana’s texts were translated into multiple languages including English, German, and Polish.

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer and translator, and lecturer in Ukrainian studies at the University of Texas in Austin, where she teaches Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Georgia. Oksana translates alone or in collaboration with Olena Jennings, Kevin Vaughn, or Daniel Belgrad. Her translations of poems and essays by Vasyl Makhno, Marianna Kiyanovska, Bohdana Matiyash, and other Ukrainian authors appeared in Postroad Magazine, The Wolf, Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translation, St. Petersburg Review, and other venues. Her original work includes two novels, a collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry, all published in Ukraine. Her most recent novel has been long-listed for the Ukrainian BBC award.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2008 and 2011). She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press 2014). Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University.

Michael M. Naydan is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and works primarily in the fields of Ukrainian and Russian literature and literary translation. He has published over forty articles on literary topics and more than seventy translations in journals and anthologies. Of his more than thirty books of published and edited translations, his most recent include Andrei Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Igor Klekh’s Adventures in the Slavic Kitchen: A Book of Essays with Recipes (Glagoslav Publishers, 2016), both co-translated with Slava Yastremski, and Yuri Vynnychuk’s The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk (Glagoslav Publishers, 2016). He has received numerous prizes for his translations including the George S.N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation (2013) from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies.

Bohdan Pechenyak was born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, immigrating to the United States in 1998 and graduating from Arcadia University (BA in sociology) and Temple University (MSW, MPH). He is a firm believer in interdisciplinary approaches, and, in his life, attempts to balance activism, scholarship, and creative pursuits. His interests in the arts include film, writing, and translation.

Wanda Phipps is the author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX[books]) and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press). She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in over one hundred literary magazines and numerous anthologies. She has worked with Virlana Tkacz on translating Ukrainian poetry since 1989.

Anton Tenser was born in Novosibirsk and lived in Kiev until immigrating to the United States in 1989. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Manchester, UK. As a linguist, Anton specializes in the Romani (Gypsy) language; he described the grammar of the Lithuanian Romani dialect, and authored several articles on Romani language and ethnography. His original poems have appeared in Polutona, TextOnly, and Vozdukh; his translations have appeared in TextOnly, Brooklyn Rail, InTranslation, and Atlanta Review, among others. He works as a linguist in San Diego and the University of Helsinki but lives in rural Ohio.

Virlana Tkacz is the artistic director of Yara Arts Group, a resident theatre company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. She has created over thirty shows with poetry she helped translate from Ukraine, Central Asia and Siberia. She received an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for her translations with Wanda Phipps of Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry. www.brama. com/yara.

Kevin Vaughn is a poet and literary translator who is currently a doctoral student in English and creative writing at the University of Georgia. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Kevin is a former Fulbright fellow to Jagiellonian University in Poland and a graduate fellow of the Cave Canem Foundation. His poems and translations have appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Mythium, Naugutuck River Review, PANK, and the anthologies: Killer Lines: Poems about Murder & Mayhem and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia. He has been the recipient of artistic residencies all over the world, including The Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Performing Arts Forum in Picardie, France.