Dmitry Golynko, born in 1969 in Leningrad, was one of the most innovative poets in contemporary Russia, employing his poetry to examine the relationship between post-Soviet language, culture, and society. The author of three books of poems—Homo Scribens, Directory, and Concrete Doves—Golynko was nominated for the Andrey Bely Prize. His poetry has been translated into several European languages. In his parallel career as a cultural critic, he defended a pioneering PhD dissertation on the Russian post-avant-garde and regularly published essays on contemporary art and cinema. After a teaching stint in South Korea and a fellowship at the Literarischer Colloqium Berlin, he lived in Saint Petersburg.

Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968) grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His latest chapbook is The Feeling Sonnets (Clinic Publishing). His latest full-length book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB), discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, and was the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the Venice Biennale. His previous books include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP) and Iterature (UDP). As translator from Russian, he works primarily with OBERIU, the 1920s-1930s underground circle led by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. He has edited the first English-language collection of their writings, called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern). His collection of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB), with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich, won the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently preparing, with Daniel Mellis, an edition of Tango with Cows, a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, which is forthcoming from UDP in 2021. He also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golynko, As It Turned Out (UDP), and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).

Rebecca Bella was born in Boston, studied Russian at Brown University, and pursued a Fulbright Fellowship in translation in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Oregon Literary Review, A Public Space, and The St. Petersburg Review. She lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Simona Schneider’s translations have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Literature Across Frontiers. She was a finalist for Three Percent’s prize for translations in Dmitry Golynko’s As It Turned Out (UDP). She is a media scholar and received a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Film & Media from the University of California, Berkeley.