Elena Fanailova is the author of eight books of poetry. Her poems have been translated into ten languages; in English translation they have been anthologized in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005), and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). She has received the Andrei Bely Award (1999), the Moscow Score Award (2003), and the Znamya award (2008). In 2013, she was awarded a fellowship in Rome by Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund. A book in Italian translation, Lena and the People, was published in Rome in 2015, translated and edited by Claudia Skandura. The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), her first book in English translation, received the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. Born in Voronezh, in central Russia, Fanailova majored in linguistics at Voronezh State University and studied medicine at the Voronezh Medical Institute. She has worked as a doctor, a university professor, and a journalist. At Radio Liberty, Fanailova was the host of the radio program Far from Moscow where she covered a broad range of topics, from the Beslan siege to new Russian prose. In recent years, her journalism has been focused on Central Europe and the Balkans. From 2012 to 2018 she traveled extensively in Ukraine interviewing Ukrainian intellectuals for Radio Liberty. She lives in Moscow.

Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator, and psychotherapist. She is the author of The Breathing Body Of This Thought (Black Square Editions), as well as the chapbooks Calendar (UDP), The Tides (Octopus Books), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in A Public Space, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Fence, jubilat, Octopus, PEN Poetry, Sangam Poetry, Seedings, The Elephants, and other publications. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting (UDP) and co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).

Stephanie Sandler is Ernest E. Monrad Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also co-chairs the Rethinking Translation Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center. She is a co-author of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford). Her translations of Elena Shvarts, Alexandra Petrova, Mara Malanova, Fedor Svarovsky, and other contemporary Russian poets have appeared in anthologies and journals, and she was a translator and co-editor of Olga Sedakova, In Praise of Poetry (Open Letter).

Aleksandr Skidan, born in Leningrad in 1965, has published five poetry collections in Russian, one of which was awarded the 2006 Andrei Bely Prize. An award-winning essayist, Skidan has published four books of essays (Critical Mass, The Resistance to/of Poetry, Summation of a Poetics, and Theses Toward the Politicization of Art and Other Texts), as well as a novel. He translates American and European literary theory and American poetry. He is a member of the art and activist collective Chto Delat? and a co-editor of the New Literary Observer. His first book in English translation, Red Shifting, was published in 2008 by Ugly Duckling Presse. In 2018, he was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship in poetry and spent the fall in Rome and Venice. He lives in St. Petersburg.