Widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets, Boris Khersonsky was born in 1950 in Chernivtsi and spent most of his life in Odessa, where he practiced medicine at a psychiatric hospital and taught psychology at Odessa National University. In Soviet times, Khersonsky was a part of Samizdat movement, which disseminated alternative, non-conformist literature. After the fall of USSR, he published many books of poetry which have been widely translated and published all over the world.
Born in Tiraspol, Moldova in 1964, Ludmila Khersonsky is an award-winning poet, author of three collections of poetry. Her work has been honored with the Voloshin Prize and translated into several languages, including German and Lithuanian. A professional translator, she has translated into Russian the poetry of many authors, including Seamus Heaney. In the U.S., her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Plume, and other journals. She lives in Odessa, Ukraine.
Katie Farris is the author of Boysgirls (Tupelo Press) and A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving (Beloit Poetry Journal) which won the Chad Walsh Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. Farris’ poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, McSweeneys, Granta, and Massachusetts Review, which awarded her the Anne Halley Poetry Prize. Farris is co-editor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets (Tupelo).
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf). He’s co-editor and co-translator of Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James) and Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) among other books. He received The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and Neustadt International Literature Prize.
