Viktor Shirali (1945-2018) began writing poetry in 1962. He was among the most prominent figures of the unofficial Leningrad culture associated with the Saigon Cafe. In 1979, he released his first book of poems, The Garden and began to publish abroad as a member of the Club 81. In 1989, his second book of poems, Amateur, appeared, and he was admitted to the Writers' Union. His two-volume Resistance" (1992) included works that could not be published in the U.S.S.R. The Long Weeping of Heydarovich Shirali according to Larisa Oleg Kuznetsova and other Imperial Passions (1999) came out after the suicide of hs lover. For the last twenty years of his life, Shirali was seriously ill, but he continued to write and publish.

Uroš Bojanović was born in Teslić, Bosnia, in 1991. He has published four collections of poetry. English translations of his poems have been published or are forthcoming in Asymptote Journal and Exchanges. His original poems have been published in Balkan literary magazines like ARS, Kritična masa, Zarez, Tema, Polja, Strane, Poezije, and Fantom slobode. Additionally, his work was included in an anthology of Balkan poets called Soft Tissue. Bojanović lives in Belgrade, Serbia.

J.  Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accents). The translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, he has edited two anthologies of Russian translations. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, and a co-diretor of Zephyr Press, he is also the co-translator of seven books of Latin American and Spanish poetry.