Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut and received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks: No (Y esY es Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. A recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award. Poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Best of the Net 2012 and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize. Work has also been translated into Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian. He lives in New York, New York where he reads chapbook submissions as the associate editor of Thrush Press.

Larissa Shmailo’s newest collection of poetry is #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books). Larissa is the editor of the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. She translated the zaum opera Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's landmark restaging and has been a translator on the Bible in Russia for the American Bible Society. Her other books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook, A Cure for Suicide (Cervená Barva Press), and the e-book, Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No -Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew), for which she received the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Larissa’s work is archived at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian, and seven universities. She received honorable mention in the Compass Award for Russian literary translation in 2011, the Elizabeth P. Braddock poetry prize in 2012, and the Goodreads May 2012 poetry contest; she was a finalist in the Glass Woman prose prize in 2012. Larissa also received the New Century Music awards for best spoken word with rock, jazz, and electronica in 2009, as well as the best album award for Exorcism. She has read at the Knitting Factory, Barnard College, the New School, New York University, the Langston Hughes residence, and for American Express/Share Our Strength.

Nava Renek is the editor of Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil 2008) and Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014). She is an educator and writer whose fiction and non-fiction has been published in a variety of literary magazines and websites. Her published works include two novels, Spiritland (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002) and No Perfect Words (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), as well as a collection of short stories Mating in Captivity (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012). In 2006, she received the first of two research grants from PSC/CUNY to begin the process of producing Wreckage of Reason, for which she received nearly 300 submissions. She lives in Brooklyn and works as program coordinator at the Women's Center at Brooklyn College/CUNY.

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator. She has authored eight books of poetry in Russian, and her most recent collection is Volk [Wolf] (Moscow: NLO, 2009). Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek, The London Magazine, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005). She is the co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk) of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin, 2015), as well as co-founder (with late Oleg Woolf) of the StoSvet literary project which includes Cardinal Points and Storony Sveta literary journals. For her Russian poetry Irina Mashinski has won several awards, including First Prizes in the Russian America (2001) and Maximilian Voloshin (2003) competitions. In 2012, she and Boris Dralyuk received First Prize in the Joseph Brodsky/ Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. Irina Mashinski holds a Ph.D. in Physical Geography and Paleoclimatology from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from New England College.

Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored twenty collections of poetry, eight books of fiction, seven plays, a biography, as well as numerous articles and translations.  An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as computer scientist specializing in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence at IBM Corporation as well as Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture at Columbia University in New York City.  He was born in Ukraine but was raised in the West.  He writes in Ukrainian and English and residers in the vicinity of New York City.  His English-language books include the novel Three Blondes and Death, a collection of stories Short Tails, three collections of mininovels The Placebo Effect Trilogy, and the play Not Medea.

Born in Milwaukee, WI, Ron Price is the author of Surviving Brothers, A Crucible for the Left Hand, and A Small Song Called Ash From the Fire. He co-founded the Free Peoples Poetry Workshop and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Poet in the Parks, Poet in Prisons, Poet in the Schools, and the Julliard School, where he has been on the faculty since 1995.