Julia Kolchinsky Dashbach is the author of 40 WEEKS, Don’t Touch the Bones, winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize, and The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays, both of which grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and AGNI, among others.
Kateryna Derysheva is a Ukrainian poet from Kharkiv, co-founder and organizer of the kntxt literary project. Her poems and translations have been published in the journals: Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literatur in Bayern, Literaturportal Bayern, Visions, Volga, SoFloPoJo, The Colon, Literature, Articulation, New Coast, Arion, Homo legens, Kreshchatik, and others. She is the author of the books Starting Point, There Will Be No Installation; co-author of the book Earth time. She was long-listed for the Arkadiy Dragomoshchenko Prize (2019) and is laureate of the Europa Mai Prize. Her poems and essays have been translated into 11 languages.)
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is a translator of collections by Ukrainian poets, Kateryna Kalytko, together with Oksana Lutsyshyna, Iryna Shuvalova, together with the author, and Vasyl Makhno. Her translation, together with the author, of Yuliya Musakovska’s The God of Freedom was released in May 2024 from Arrowsmith Press. She founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations appear in the New York Times, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. Livshin co-translated A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry and Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska,. She is a private creative writing teacher, working with children.