“mama is laughing haha . . .”

¹ In Azerbaijani, “Russian child”

² “father dear”

Born in 1975 in Soviet Ukraine, Linor Goralik is an artist, writer, and poet who lives in Israel and addresses Russian-speaking audiences across the world. In 2022 she began to produce a series called A Few Icons about the War, including these works after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In 2022 Goralik founded the internet journal ROAR: Russian Oppositional Arts Review, for which she serves as chief editor.

Egana Dzhabbarova is a poet and associate professor at the Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg, Russia. She has published three books of poetry and is organizer of the festival MEZHA. She has been recognized with the Poetic Debut Award and was also longlisted and shortlisted for the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Award. Her work is featured in the international anthologies Under One Cover (Kazakhstan) and F-Letter (England). Her poetry has been translated into English, Polish, German, and Italian. She currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations include Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound. She lives in New York.

Hilah Kohen is a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student currently in residence at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Her collaborations in Juhuri (Kavkazi Jewish) language advocacy include curatorial work for the Jewish Language Project and an article foregrounding Indigenous languages of the Russian Federation for Russian Language Journal. With Josephine von Zitzewitz, Kohen co-edited the “Russophonia” issue of Words Without Borders.

Mark Lipovetsky is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. Among his many publications are books on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, and post-Soviet literature. Lipovetsky is also one of four co-authors of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford, 2018). He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his contributions to literary studies.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Russian poetry, history, and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, global russophone culture, and translates contemporary Russian poetry. He is the editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019). His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press / Northern Illinois University Press in 2023.