Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad in 1968 and immigrated with his family to New York in 1979. He is the author of the poetry collections Iterature and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, both of which are published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and a scholar and translator of Russian avant-garde and contemporary poetry, especially by the 1930s underground writers Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. He currently lives in Berlin and New York and teaches literature in the Liberal Studies program at New York University. His contributions to New York Review Books include translating Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (winner of the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association) and The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms.