Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and five books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, Living Pictures, received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and came in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press) and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). Barskova also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad. She teaches Russian Literature at UC Berkeley. Barskova was claimed to be an "inoagent" in October 2025.