Victor Sosnora:  was born into a family of Leningrad circus performers.  In 1962 he published his first book.  He was the only representative of the official Schestidesjatniki in Leningrad and often traveled abroad lecturing in Paris and the United States. His poems were officially printed for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1989.  He still lives in St. Petersburg.

Elena Shvarts:  (1948–2010), one of the most important contemporary Russian poets, prose writers, essayists, and translators.  She was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), and became widely known in Leningrad’s underground literary circles when she was a teenager.  Her poetry circulated in Samizdat, or underground self-published literature, bringing her early fame and a reputation as one of the most unusual writers of her generation.  Among her older and younger contemporaries, who were first officially published during Perestroika in the 1980s, her poetry stands on its own.  She was the recipient of many literary awards in Russia, including the Andrei Belyi Prize (1981) and Severnaia Palmira (1999), many international prizes, as well as Russia’s prestigious Triumph prize in 2003.

Andrei Sen-Senkov:  was born in 1968 in Tajikistan.  He is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose.  He was awarded the Turgenev Festival prize for Short Prose in 1998 and in 2006 won the Andrei Beliy Prize.  A collection of his work in English, Anatomical Theater,won the PEN Center USA translation Award in 2015.  His work has been translated into twenty five languages.  He lives in Moscow.

Lev Rubinstein:  one of Russia’s best-known and internationally recognized poets, is also an influential essayist, social activists, and cultural and political commentator.  His literary forms are often highly experimental.  With Vsevolod Nekrasov and D.A. Prigov, he was a founder of the “Moscow Conceptualism” trend in poetry.