Cleaners

Vladimir (Vlad) Pryakhin was born in 1957 in Tula, Russia. In the 1980s he published The Idealist, a samizdat journal of poetry and prose. Since 1992, his poems and short articles have appeared in literary magazines in Russia as well as in other countries. He is the author of ten books of poetry. In 2012 he became the editor and publisher of The Environment, an international literary almanac. Since 2017, he has been the editor of www.medium.land, a portal dedicated to poetry and art. The winner of several literary awards, he participates in free-verse festivals in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Nina Kossman is a Moscow-born artist, bilingual poet, translator of Russian poetry, sculptor, and playwright. Among her published works are three books of poems in Russian and in English, two collections of short stories, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, a novel, and several plays. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary magazines in and outside of Russia. A recipient of many awards, she lives in New York. She edits East-West Literary Forum, a bilingual journal (in English and Russian).