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Glyn Maxwell was born in 1962 and grew up in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. He read English at Oxford before studying Poetry and Theatre under Derek Walcott at Boston University. His first collection, Tale of the Mayor’s Son, was published in 1990; since then Maxwell has gone on to publish nine books of poetry as well as novels, plays and libretti. He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize three times, the Forward Prize twice, the Whitbread Prize twice, and has received the Somerset Maugham Award (Out of the Rain), E.M. Forster Award and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award (The Nerve). In 1997 Maxwell moved to America, living in Amherst (Massachusetts) 1997-2002 and New York City 2002-2006. In 2006 he returned to the UK and now lives in London.
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 Eileen Myles is a poet and writer based in New York City. She has published over twenty books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including Inferno (a poet’s novel), Skies, Cool for You, School of Fish, and Not Me. The Importance of Being Iceland (2009) travel essays on art was awarded a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. She contributes to numerous journals including Art in America and Artforum, Parkett, and Bookforum, The Nation, and The Believer.
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 Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, and translator born in Salem, Massachusetts, She earned a BA from Barnard College, and completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. Her books of poetry include The Cow(2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); and Mercury (2011). Her poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (2011) and Gurlesque (2010).
Reines’s first play Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards.
Reines has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, and was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley in 2009, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She has traveled to Haiti multiple times as part of the on-going relief efforts there.
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 Jami Attenberg is the author of Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season. Her latest book, The Middlesteins, was on The New York
Times bestseller list, and will be published in the UK, Russia,
Taiwan, Italy and Holland. She has contributed to The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Hairpin, and numerous other
publications. Visit her online at jamiattenberg.com |
 José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana in 1962. He lived in Russia for twelve years, has translated the works of Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova into Spanish, and has taught Russian history in Mexico City. His work, which includes essays, short stories, and translations, has been published all over the world. His novel Livadia appeared in the United States as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. He received a Latin American Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002, and in 2004-2005 was the Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. He currently lives in New York and Mexico City.
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 Dawn Raffel's illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was published in June and was on Oprah's Summer Reading List for 2012. She is also the author for two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division (soon to be reissued)—and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania. She is now Editor at Large, Books at Readers Digest, and the editor of The Literarian, the magazine for the Center for Fiction in New York. She lives outside New York City with her husband and sons. (photo by Claire Holt)
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 Antanas Sileika's latest novel, Underground, was chosen as a Globe and Mail best book of 2011. Translated and featured at the Vilnius Book Fair of 2013, the novel has also had its film rights sold to Donelos Studija. Author of three other books of fiction and many magazine and newspaper articles, Sileika has won a National Magazine Award and been short-listed for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto Book Award. He is the director of Toronto's Humber School for Writers.
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 Debra Spark is the author of four books of fiction, including most recently The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, and the novel Good for the Jews. She is also the author of Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark's work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, Narrative, Five Points, the Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.
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 Alex Halberstadt is the author of Lonely Avenue: the Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus and the forthcoming Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a family memoir. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, New York, Salon.com, The Washington Post, Saveur, the Paris Review and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the OMI International Arts Center.
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 Menachem Kaiser is a writer and journalist living between Brooklyn, NY, and various Eastern European countries. He was 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellow (in creative writing) to Lithuania, and taught Contemporary Jewish Culture and Creative Writing in Vilnius University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vogue, Slate, The Atlantic, Tablet, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vol1, The Rumpus, Stumble, and elsewhere, and was recently shortlisted for Glimmertrain's Fiction Open. He is creator of the Vilna Ghetto Digital Monument, an interactive map of the Vilna Ghetto, and has lectured around the world about historical space. He is a graduate of Columbia University, in New York, and the Toronto School of Circus Arts.
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Writing Vilnius
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 Laimonas Briedis is a native of Vilnius and a long-time resident of Vancouver (Canada). He received a
doctoral degree in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia and conducted his postdoctoral
research at the History Department of the University of Toronto. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book,
Vilnius: City of Strangers, which narrates the history and geography of the city’ s centuries long encounter with
foreigners. The book has been on the bestseller list in Lithuania and was widely reviewed in the local and global
press: Slavic Review described the author’ s narrative of Vilnius as “ an informative and engaging story” and The
Economist called it “ a subtle and evocative book.” Currently, Briedis is working on the creation of a literary
map of Vilnius and the cultural cartography of the diasporic Lithuania. He is also a guest editor of Lituanus, the
Lithuanian quarterly journal of arts and sciences, published in Chicago.
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| Photography
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 Andrew Miksys is a native of Seattle, Washington. His photography has been shown internationally including exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre, and De Appel Contemporary Arts Centre in Amsterdam. In 2002 he was selected by Photo District News (PDN) as one of the "top 30 emerging photographers to watch" and in 2006 he was featured in Slate magazine as Slate's "Artist of the Month". In 2007 he published, BAXT, a book of photographs from his series about the Lithuanian Roma (Gypsy) community. Poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu wrote the introduction to BAXT. Miksys has also been the recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000), the J. William Fulbright Program (1998 and 2002), the Aaron Siskind Foundation (2009) and Light Work (2011). His photography has been published in many publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Exquisite Corpse, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. He currently divides his time between the US and Vilnius, Lithuania.
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| Editor/Publisher in Residence
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 Rebecca Wolff is the author of three books of poems ( Manderley, Figment, The King) and a novel (The Beginners, Riverhead, 2011). She is the founding editor of Fence, and Fence Books, and The Constant Critic, and a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. She lives in Hudson, New York.
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Writers and Artists in Residence and Guests
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 Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories, Nimrod's Prize Stories, Croatia's Zarez, and on New York Public Radio and NPR's This American Life. She lives in San Francisco, where she's finishing up a collection of stories and beginning work on a novel.
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 Gint Aras (Karolis Gintaras Žukauskas) has been trapped on planet Earth since 1973. He is the author of a novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar, and his fiction and non-ficiton have appeared in Antique Children, Criminal Class Review, The Hellgate Review, Curbside Splendor, Šiaurės Atėnai, and other publications. Currently a community college professor and contributing editor to The Good Men Project, he lives in Oak Park, IL with his family. Check out his website: http://gint-aras.com |
Sergey Gandlevsky has published several books of poetry, a memoir, and a book of essays in Russian. His work has been included in every major anthology, including: 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel (Doubleday Press), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr Press). An integral member of the ’70s generation, Gandlevsky was one of the underground Russian poets who began by writing only for themselves and their circles of friends during the Brezhnev era. Despite their relative cultural obscurity—or perhaps, precisely because of their situation as internal émigrés—Gandlevsky and the Seventies Generation forged new directions in Russian poetry, unfettered by the pressures that burdened Russian writers both prior to, and during, the Soviet period. Gandlevsky has since become one of the most important contemporary Russian poets, winning both the Little Booker Prize and the Anti-Booker Prize in 1996 for his poetry and prose. Gandlevsky, in poet Chris Green’s words, "seems to have lived by poetry, as if it were a raft to swim through the last twenty-five years of Soviet history."
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 Linor Goralik is a writer, poet, and artist born in Ukraine in 1975. As a writer, published a number of prose books (including No (a novel co-authored by Sergey Kuznetsov), 2004, ...And Said:, 2004, Half of the Sky (co-authored by Stanislav Lvovsky), 2004, Long Story Short, 2009, Folklore of the Zone M1 and others. As a poet, published a number of poetry collections including Non-Locals, 2003 and Catch Them, Piter, 2007. Other poetry and prose collections were published by Novyj Mir, Vozduh, .txt and other periodicals. As a children's writer, authored Agatha Returns Home, 2009, and Martin Never Cries, 2007. Writes for Vedomosti, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Fashion Theory, Novyj Mir and other periodicals. Teaches Introduction to Costume and Identity in Moscow's Highest School of Economics. As a translator from English/Hebrew, published two books of Etgar Keret's prose as well as a poetry book by Vitautas Pliura (in cooperation with Stanislav Lvovsky). Author of Hare PZ! comic books.
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 Mikhail Iampolski is a Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Russian and Slavic studies at the New York University. He moved to the United States from Russia in 1991, first as a researcher at the Getty Center and then as a faculty member at NYU. His interests include Slavic literatures and cinema, theories of representation, and the body in culture. He is the author of 300 articles in several languages, has written ten books, and has edited or translated as many others. His most recent book is about the indeterminacy in culture.
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 Kerry Shawn Keys’ roots are in the Appalachian Mountains. From 1998 to 2000, he taught translation theory and creative composition as a Fulbright Associate Professor at Vilnius University. He has dozens of books to his credit, including translations from Portuguese (Requiem, Lȇdo Ivo, 2011) and Lithuanian, and his own poems informed by rural America and Europe, and Brazil and India (Peace Corps) where he lived for considerable time. A children’s book, The Land of People, received a Lithuanian laureate in 2008 for artwork he co-authored. His most recent book is Night Flight(poems), 2012. Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992, and in 2005 a National Endowment For The Arts Literature Fellowship. He received a Translation Laureate Award from the Lithuanian Writers Union in 2003. In 2011, two of his books of translations from the Lithuanian were published – Bootleg Copy (Laurynas Katkus), and Still Life (Sonata Paliulytė). Keys is also the English-language editor of the Lithuanian Holocaust Atlas, 2011. He was a Senior Fulbright Research grantee for African-Brazilian studies, and is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union and PEN. He also writes a quarterly column, Letter From Vilnius: Eastern/Central Europe and Excursions Elsewhere for Poetry International, San Diego State University. He is the Republic of Užupis World Poetry Ambassador.
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 Vitaly Komar was born in Moscow, USSR in 1943 and has been living in New York since 1978. He was one of the founders of the Sots Art movement (soviet Pop/Conceptual art) and a pioneer of multi-stylistic post-modernism (1972-73). Komar worked in collaboration with Alex Melamid from 1973 to 2003. In 1974, he was arrested during a performance of Art Belongs to the People and later, on September 15th, his and A. Melamid's work along with the works of other non-conformist artists was destroyed by Soviet Authorities at the open-air Bulldozer Exhibition. After the Symbols of the Big Bang (quest for spirituality in science and natural forces) exhibited at the Yeshiva University Museum (New York, 2002-03) the artist started the Three-Day Weekend uniting symbols of different faiths and concepts of spirituality with childhood photographs of him and his parents. This deeply personal work marked the end of his collaboration with Alex Melamid.
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 Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. Novakovich was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for his body of work. He has taught at Bard, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State, and now, Concordia University in Montreal.
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 Gilles Rozier was born in 1963 in La Tronche. He graduated from a top notch school of management in 1984. He started learning Yiddish in 1985 and had his Thesis Defense in Yiddish Literature with mentor Rachel Ertel. He has been acting as General Manager of Bibliothèque Medem in Paris since 1994. He is married and has two sons. Both French and Yiddish are spoken at home. Gilles Rozier has published five novels in French. Some of his poems in Yiddish have been published by literary magazines Di pen (Oxford), Yerusholaimer almanakh (Jerusalem) and Toplpunkt (Tel-Aviv).
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 Alexandr Skidan was born in Leningrad in 1965. Poet, critic, translator. Author of three collections of poetry and three books of essays. He translated Paul Bowles’s novel “The Sheltering Sky”, poetry of Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and other contemporary American poets, as well as theory and art criticism. Skidan participated in the International Writing Program (Iowa, 1994) and in the Open World Program (2005). In 1998 he received Turgenev Award for the short prose. Winner of Andrey Bely Prize in poetry for the collection “Red Shifting” (2006) and the Award “Most” (Bridge) for the best critical text on poetry (2006). His poetry is translated into many languages and published in different anthologies. In 2008 his book “Red Shifting” was published in US by Ugly Duckling Press. Co-editor of the Moscow-based “New Literary Review” magazine. He lives in Saint-Petersburg.
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Dalia Staponkutė (born in Šiauliai 1964) is an essay writer and a translator. After graduating from the School of Philosophy of St Petersburg University, Russia, for three years she lectured philosophy in Lithuanian universities. With the fall of the Berlin Wall she moved to England, and soon after--to Cyprus. For her intellectual and academic activities she was awarded a Doctoral degree in Comparative Cultural Studies and now teaches translation theory at the University of Cyprus. Herself she translates literature from modern Greek to Lithuanian and vice versa and writes personal literary essays in her mother tongue. For two decades now Staponkutė resides in Nicosia with two Cypriot-Lithuanian daughters. Her only collection of autobiographical essays Rain versus Sun (Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2007) was nominated for the 2007 book of the year in Lithuania.
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Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American poet and translator residing in New York City. His books of poems include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza and Iterature, both published by Ugly Duckling Presse. As translator, Ostashevsky has edited OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, the first English-language anthology of writings by a 1920s-30s Leningrad avant-garde group led by Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. 