Yana Kane was born in the Soviet Union and came to the US as a refugee at the age of 16. She has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University. Currently, she works as a senior principal engineer in data science. Yana is a student in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, where she has been awarded the Mitch and Lynn Baumeister Scholarship.

Anna Krushelnitskaya (b. 1975) is a poet, writer, blogger, and translator. Born in the Soviet Far East, she grew up in Chita, and moved to the US in 2004. She is the author of two books of poems in English and a 700-page bilingual oral history collection Cold War Casual.

Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer, and translator of poetry. His translations from English and French into Russian have appeared in several book collections. His latest work is a complete translation of Ted Hughes’ “Crow” (Jaromír Hladík Press, 2020) and Allen Ginsberg’s “The Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems” (Podpisnie Izdaniya, 2021). Dmitri’s Russian-to-English translations have been published in journals (Cardinal Points, Delos, The Café Review, Metamorphoses etc) and in Maria Stepanova’s “The Voice Over” (CUP, 2021). In 2017, his translation of a poem by Stepanova won the Compass Award competition.

Julia Nemirovskaya (b. 1962) is a poet and writer, author of six books of poetry and prose. She was born and raised in Moscow and was part of the “new wave” underground group of poets. She emigrated to Sweden and then the US in 1988. Julia teaches culture and theater at the University of Oregon.