In distinct ways, all three poets featured in Relocations are engaged in the project of renovating Russia’s great modernist tradition for a radically different historical situation. They write poems of imaginative daring, pushing recognizable scenarios into the fantastic, the surreal or the speculative, bending form and language to the task.
 
Polina Barskova began publishing her poetry at age nine and is the author of eight books of poems; her latest, Ariel’s Dispatch (Soobshchenie Ariela, NLO, 2011), was nominated for an Andrey Bely award. Two collections of her poetry in English translation appeared recently: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010) and The Zoo in Winter (Melville House Press, 2010). She is a published scholar with degrees in classical literature (from St. Petersburg University) and Slavic languages and literatures (UC Berkeley). Her research has focused on cultural life during the siege of Leningrad, about which she has numerous publications and two forthcoming books. She currently teaches Russian literature at Hampshire College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
 
Anna Glazova is a poet, translator and scholar of German and Comparative Literature with a PhD from Northwestern University. She is the author of three books of poems, the most recent, For a Shrew (Dlia zemleroiki, NLO, 2013), being honored with the Russian Prize for Poetry. She has translated into Russian books by Robert Walser, Unica Zürn and Ladislav Klima; her translations of Paul Celan’s poetry recently appeared under the title Speak you, too (Govori i ty, Ailuros, 2012). A volume of her poems in translations by Anna Khasin, Twice under the Sun, appeared with Shearsman Books in 2008. Her scholarship has focused on the work of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. She teaches and resides in Hamburg, Germany and the United States.
 
Maria Stepanova is the author of nine books of poems and the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Andrei Bely award (2005) and a Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship (2010). Among her most notable works are a book of post-modern ballads, Songs of the Northern Southerners (Pesni severnykh iuzhan, ARGO-RISK, 2001) and a book-length narrative poem, John Doe’s Prose (Proza Ivana Sidorova, NLO, 2008). Relocations presents the first extensive selection of her poems in English translation. Her activities as an essayist and journalist make her a visible cultural figure. Since 2007 she has worked as editor of the independent online journal OpenSpace.ru, now reconfigured as the crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru. She is a lifelong resident of Moscow.
 
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Catherine Ciepiela is a scholar and translator of modern Russian poetry. She is the author of a book on Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak (The Same Solitude, Cornell UP, 2006) and co-editor with Honor Moore of The Stray Dog Cabaret (NYRB 2006), a book of Paul Schmidt’s translations of the Russian modernists. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, Pequod and The Common. She teaches Russian literature and poetic translation at Amherst College.
 
Anna Khasin is an independent translator and poet living in Boston. Her earlier translations of Anna Glazova were published by Shearsman Books under the title Twice Under the Sun (2008).
 
Sibelan Forrester is Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College with a scholarly focus on Russian modernist poetry, particularly the work of Marina Tsvetaeva. She writes her own poetry and has published poetic and scholarly translations from Croatian (Dubravka Oraić-Tolić’s American Scream and Palindrome Apocalypse, Ooligan Press, 2004), Russian (Elena Ignatova’s Diving Bell, Zephyr Press, 2006; Vladimir Propp’s Russian Folktale, Wayne State University Press, 2012), and Serbian (stories by Milica Mićić-Dimovska and an excerpt from Miroljub Todovorić’s verbal-visual novel Apeiron).