Aigerim Tazhi (Айгерим Тажи) is one of the best-known contemporary Kazakh poets. She is the author of БОГ-О-СЛОВ (THEO-LOG-IAN, which could also be read as GOD O' WORDS) (Musagetes, Kazakhstan, 2004) and the bilingual poetry book Бумажная кожа/Paper-Thin Skin (Russian-English, Zephyr Press, USA, 2019, translated by J. Kates). Tazhi won the International Literary Steps Prize in Poetry in 2003; in 2011, she was a finalist for the International Debut Prize in Poetry; in 2019, she was included in the prize list of the International Literary Poetry Award and named a finalist of the International Literary Voloshin Contest. Her work has been featured in many prominent literary magazines and anthologies; and her poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Armenian, Uzbek and other languages. In 2009 Tazhi created a continuing project of literary installations and performances, Visible Poetry. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and co-director of Zephyr Press. The author of several collections of his own poetry, he is also the translator of more than a dozen books by Russian and French poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Mikhail Yeryomin, Aleksey Porvin, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Sergey Stratanovsky. He co-translated four books of Latin American poetry, was the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and was the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, and a Käpylä Translation Prize.
J. Kates is a poet, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. Three chapbooks of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River Press), Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing), and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press), were followed by a full-length collection, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books, 2012). His translations include The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin; and Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and edited the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Bloodaxe Books, UK; Zephyr Press, USA, 1999). A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry.