Polina Barskova published her debut when she was only eight years old. She has lived in the United States since 1998. She studied classical philology in St. Petersburg and Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she currently teaches. Apart from her extensive poetic work--eight volumes of poetry published since 1991--she dedicates her work as a literary scholar and editor to the poets of the siege of Leningrad.

Catherine Ciepiela is a professor of Russian at Amherst College and translator of Russian literature. She is the author of The Same Solitude, a nonfiction work about the epistolary romance between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak, which received the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book of Literary/Cultural Criticism in 2007 and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice.

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of the poetry collections The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza and Iterature, both published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, the first collection of writings by Vvedensky and friends in English translation. Ostashevsky teaches in the liberal studies program at New York University.