Iya Kiva is poet, translator and journalist. She was born in 1984 in Donetsk. Because of the Russian-Ukrainian war she has lived in Kyiv since the summer of 2014. She is the author of two collections of poetry, “Farther from Heaven (2018) and “The First Page of Winter” (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarus writers “We will awaken as others: conversations with contemporary Belarus authors about the past, the present, and the future of Belarus” (2021). Her poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. Translations into Bulgarian were published as a poetry book “Witness of Namelessness” (2022, translator Denis Olegov). Kiva is the recipient of a Gaude Polonia fellowship (2021), the Dartmouth College writer support program (2022), Documenting Ukraine program (Austria, 2022) and others. Based in Lviv, Ukraine.
Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at U.C. San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderland (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020). She is at work on a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry and community.
Yuliya Ilchuk is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (2021). She is currently researching memory and identity in post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian literature.
Katherine E. Young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist).She is the translator of work by Anna Starobinets (memoir), Akram Aylisli (fiction), and Iya Kiva and numerous other Russophone poets from different countries. Awards include the 2022 Granum Foundation Translation Prize and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.
Riccardo Duranti has taught English Literature and Translation at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. In 1996 he received the Italian National Award for translation and in 2014 the Catullo prize for translation of poetry. He has translated all of Raymond Carver’s works and authors such as John Berger, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Nathanael West, Richard Brautigan, Caryl Churchill, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Bond, Kae Tempest, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry and Robert Coover. Among the authors of childhood literature he translated there are: Roald Dahl, Ted Hughes, Margaret Mahy, Britta Teckentrup, Patricia MacLachan, Eric Malpass, Yuval Zommer. His poetry books include: Bivio di voce (1987), The Archer’s Paradox (1993), L’affettuosa fantasia (1998), Made in Mompeo, haiku e immagini (with Rino Bianchi, 2007) and Meditamondo (2013). In 2015 his first book of short stories came out: L’orsacchiotto Carver e altri segreti. He lives in the Sabine Mountains.
Eugenia Kanishcheva (born in 1966) is a translator of fiction, poetry and children’s books (English, Ukrainian, Russian). She lived in Crimea, Ukraine, left home in 2014 after the occupation of Crimea by Russian troops, and is based in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.