Iya Kiva: is a poet, translator, and journalist. She was born in Donetsk and fled the war in 2014 to settle in Kyiv. Shortly after arriving, she began shifting from writing in her native Russian to writing in her second language, Ukrainian. She is the author of two volumes of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and translation.

Boris Khersonsky: born in 1950, is a poet, translator, professor of clinical psychology, and lives in Odessa where he graduated from the Institute of Medicine in 1974. In 2006 he published Family Archive, followed in 2008 by Under Construction and Out of Fence. He is the winner of numerous literary awards. Since 1998 he has been the editor of the magazine “Krešcatik.” He won the Foundation’s Josif Brodsky Prize in 2008. For the publication of the German edition of Familien–archiv (Wiesel Verlag), 2010, he was awarded the special prize “Literaris.”

Lyudmyla Khersonska: is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian and two in English. She was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders. Displaced by Russia’s war in Ukraine, she is currently in residency at Civitella Ranieri, Umbria, Italy.

Alexandr Kabanov: was born in Kherson in 1968. He studied journalism at the Kyiv State University. An author of eleven books of poetry and numerous publications in major Russian literary journals, he has been awarded a number of prestigious literary prizes, among them the Russian Prize, International Voloshin Prize, Antologia Prize, and the Novy Mir Literary Magazine Award for the best poetry publication of the year.