Ilya Danishevsky, author

Ilya Danishevsky is a Russian author and publisher for the opposition. He graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and studied the history of religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is editor-in-chief of the Anhedonia book project (published by AST) dedicated to studying the institution of violence in contemporary Russia. Danishevsky is interested in those who describe reality in spite of official discourse. In 2014 he published his novel Tenderness for the Dead (Nezhnost’ k mertvym), and his book Mannelig in Chains (Mannelig v tsepyakh) came out in 2018.

Nastya Denisova, author

Poet and artist Nastya Denisova was born in Leningrad in 1984 and lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited of the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). She has published in many print and on-line journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), and The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image; see examples here: https://vimeo.com/nastyadenisova

Anne O. Fisher, translator, translation editor, and co-editor

Anne O. Fisher’s recent translations are Ksenia Buksha’s avant-garde novel The Freedom Factory (Phoneme Media, 2018) and, with poet and husband Derek Mong, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press, 2018), winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. As Senior Lecturer in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Translation and Interpreting Studies program, Fisher teaches remotely from her 115-year-old home in Indiana.

Dmitry Kuzmin, author

Scholar, editor, translator and poet Dmitry Kuzmin (b. 1968) has translated poems from English, Ukrainian, and French into Russian, and his own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages. His two poetry collections are It’s Good to Be Alive (Khorosho byt zhivym, 2008) and Blankets Not Stipulated (Kovdri ne peredbacheny, Ukraine, 2018). His scholarship includes the textbook Poetry (Poeziya) (co-author, 2016) and a book-length study of one-line poems (2016). Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989, and has been the head of poetry imprint ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993. He is also editor-in-chief of the Vavilon Internet project (www.vavilon.ru) and of the poetry quarterly Vozdukh (Air). In 2014 Kuzmin emigrated from Russia to Latvia and started Literature Without Borders. Kuzmin holds a PhD from Samara State Pedagogical University.

Stanislav Lvovsky, author

Stanislav Lvovsky (b. 1972) was born in Moscow and has worked in advertising, cultural events management, and journalism. Lvovsky is former editor-in-chief of the “Literature” section of OPENSPACE.RU/COLTA.RU and winner of several Russian literary awards. He is the author of six published collections of poetry, one short story collection and one novel (written in co-authorship with Linor Goralik). Lvovsky regularly publishes articles on political and social issues as well as on cultural history and contemporary Russian poetry. His own poetry has been translated into English, French, Chinese, Italian and other languages. Currently he is finishing his DPhil thesis on Soviet cultural history at the University of Oxford.

Margarita Meklina, author, contributor, and co-editor

Bilingual essayist and fiction writer Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her English-language articles and short stories were featured in The Cardiff Review’s queer issue, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Words Without Borders, while her fiction in English translation has appeared in the Norton Flash Fiction International (2015), The Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toad Suck Review and Eleven Eleven. Meklina has written six books in Russian (two of them in collaboration with Lida Yusupova and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko) and two, the YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote, and a collection of short stories A Sauce Stealer, in English. Meklina’s awards include the Andrey Bely Prize (2003), the Yeltsin Center’s Russian Prize (2008), the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize (2018) and The Norton Girault Literary Prize’s Honorable Mention (2019).

Lida Yusupova, author

Lida Yusupova is the author of three books of poetry, Irasaliml, Ritual C-4, and Dead Dad, and co-author with Margarita Meklina of the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki). Dead Dad was awarded the Difference (Razlichie) poetry prize in 2017, honoring her “books in which poetry becomes an investigation. … The jury took special note of the innovative and uncompromising language in her discussions of violence.” In 2016 she was invited to attend AATSEEL (the American Association of Teacher of Slavic and East-European Languages), an honor offered annually to a single poet. Her work has been published in the journals Air (Vozdukh), Mitya’s Magazine (Mitin Zhurnal), Modern Poetry in Translation, St. Petersburg Review, Atlanta Review, and others. Her verse has been translated into English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Czech, and Polish. She has lived in Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem and now resides in Toronto and on an island off the coast of Belize. Kirill Kobrin has said of Yusupova’s poems, “Their angle of observation and description is nearly impossible for Russian poetry.”

Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina), author

Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina) is a native Muscovite. She has published a prose collection, Freakipedia, or the Adventures of a Shard (Frikipedia, ili Pokhozhdenia oskolka, 2010), and three poetry collections: W (Zh*, 2000), Voilà: A Genre Anthology (Voilà: Antologia zhanra, 2004), and A Cow Ate [the First Word] ([Pervoe slovo] syela korova, 2008).  

Zelenina is a historian and the author of From Judas’s Scepter to Fool’s Staff: Jews in the Medieval Spanish Court (Ot skipetra Iudy k zhesly shuta: prodvornye yevrei v srednevekovoy Ispanii, 2007), Judaism Two: Faces of the Renaissance (Iudaika dva: renessans v litsakh, 2015), and The Fiery Foe of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Surveillance of the Inquisition (Ognennyy vrag marranov: zhizn i smert pod nadzorom inkvizitsii, 2018). She was editor and translator at the Gesharim/Cultural Bridges (Mosty kultury/Gesharim) publishing house and editor-in-chief of the website Booknik.

She has also taught in Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (RSUH). Currently Zelenina is Associate Professor in RSUH’s Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies and a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation.

* The letter zh is the first letter in the word zhenshchina (woman).