Most famous abroad for his novel Doctor Zhivago, at home, Boris Pasternak is known just as much for his poetry. His translations of Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s plays into modern, accessible Russian are truly foundational works. Born in 1890, he witnessed the Russian Empire become the Soviet regime. Once at the center of Moscow's literary circle, he would eventually lose most of his friends (Mandelstam and Tabidze to the Great Purge; Tsvetaeva and Iashvili to suicide). Pasternak himself narrowly escaped arrest and likely eventual death. In 1937, he refused to co-sign a statement condemning two enemies of the state. Perhaps apocryphally, Stalin spared him from execution, stating, "Leave that holy fool alone." Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958, but declined it, following a smear campaign and threats of deportation. He died at 70, in his summer home, in the company of his sons.

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.

Liya M. Akoury (nee Liya Markovna Rakhkovskaya) was born in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). She currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she works as a clinical psychologist by day. By night, she is also a poet, a speculative fiction writer, and a translator of Russian poetry. Her poetry appears in Rattle magazine and the Blue Unicorn, and her flash fiction in 365 tomorrows. Having witnessed the end of democracy in her homeland and seeing dictatorial patterns likewise emerge in her new home country, she agrees wholeheartedly with Meena Alexander: “We have poetry so we do not die of history.”