Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist, and editor in chief of the online newspaper Colta.ru. In 2018, she was awarded the Bolshaya Kniga Award for In Memory of Memory.
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and lives mainly in Berlin. He will be reading from The Feeling Sonnets, his next poetry collection forthcoming from NYRB Poets. Gwytheth Lewis described the Feeling Sonnets as "an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious." His most recent translation, Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, a book of short stories about refugees from the war in the Donbas in 2014-2015, was just released by New Directions.
Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor. His books include the poetry collections Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square) and Dead Winter (Fonograf), as well as the translations Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook) and Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets; with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the 2014 National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and Civitella Ranieri. In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse where he edited and designed books, periodicals, and ephemera for more than twenty years. As of 2022, he is editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University's School of the Arts.