Yasha Klots holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Yale University and is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. His research is focused on book history, Russian and East European émigré literatures and cultures, urbanism and literary representation of cityscapes, multilingualism and translation, and Gulag narratives. He is the author of Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian), and Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Cornell, 2023; NLO 2024). He is also a co-translator of Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (Northern Illinois UP, 2010). In 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he incorporated Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative for the study of banned books from the Cold War to the present, as a nonprofit organization for the purpose of supporting students and scholars displaced by war or repressions in their home countries.