Semyon Khanin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1970. He is the author of two collections of poetry in Russian, Tol'ko chto (2003; Just now) and Opushchennye podrobnosti(2008; Missed details). His poetry has been translated into Latvian, English, Czech, German, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, and Ukranian. He is a participant in the literary project Orbita and editor of the almanac by the same name.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on global socialist and global russophone cultures as well as history and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, and translates poetry from Russian and Latvian. His most recent book is Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders (2024).

Julia Bloch is Assistant Professor at the Bard College MAT program in Delano, California, and an editor of the online poetics journal Jacket2. She grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia, and received her PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Letters to Kelly Clarkson is forthcoming from Sidebrow Books; she has published poems recently in Aufgabe, P-Queue, and Peacock Online Review.

Karina Sotnik works in science and innovation and also translates contemporary poetry. She is drawn to language that experiments, crosses borders, and reshapes how we see the world. Her translations have appeared in Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (2015) as well as 1913: A Journal of Forms, World Literature Today, and other journals.