Contributing Editors
Katherine E. Young is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Woman Drinking Absinthe, Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist), and two chapbooks. She is the editor of Written in Arlington and curator of Spoken in Arlington. She is the translator of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets, Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli, and two poetry collections by Inna Kabysh. Young’s translations of contemporary Russophone poetry and prose have won international awards and appear in Asymptote, LA Review of Books, Subtropics, and many others; several translations have been made into short films. Young was named a 2020 Arlington County (Virginia) Individual Artist Grant recipient, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, and a 2015.
Rajendra Chitnis is currently Associate Professor of Czech at Oxford. He has published widely on Czech, Slovak and Russian literatures, and is the author of books including Vladislav Vančura: The Heart of the Czech Avant-garde (Prague: Karolinum Press, Charles University, Prague, 2007) and Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 1988-1998 (London, New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005). He is currently completing a book on the Czech literary movement of ruralism.
David Keplinger is a professor and poet, and the author of five collections: most recently Another City (Milkweed, 2018), which was awarded 2019 Rilke Prize. Among his other collections are The Most Natural Thing (New Issues, 2013) and The Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006) , which won the Colorado Book Award. His first book, The Rose Inside, was chosen by the poet Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. Keplinger has been awarded the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 he produced By and By, an album of eleven songs based on the poetry of his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran. He performed and presented on the project at the National Portrait Gallery’s Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013.
Karen von Kuneš is a faculty member at Yale University (teaching courses in Czech language, literature and film), Fellow of the Yale Jonathan Edwards College and Associate of the Harvard Davis Center. She is the author of Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals (Lexington Books of Rowman and Littlefield, May 2019), Czech-English/English-Czech Practical Dictionary (Hippocrene, 2011), Beyond the Imaginable: 240 Ways of Looking at Czech (Práh, 1999), 72 Discussions of the Czech Language (Práh, 1995), Fast & Easy Czech (Crown, 1992), as well as the coauthor of Barron’s Travel Wise Czech (1998). She is also a contributor to several scholarly books, including Critical Essays on Milan Kundera, and to Between Texts, Languages and Cultures. Her critical manuscript, Milos Forman’s Vision, Mission and Execution is due for publication in 2022. Prior to Yale, Dr. von Kuneš taught Czech and Russian languages at Harvard University, Slavic literatures and cultural studies at Boston College, the University of Texas-Austin, Boston University and Tufts and most recently at Yale-NUS in Singapore (2015).
Jordan Plevneš, was born in 1953 in Macedonia. He writes plays, novels poetry and essays. His work has been translated into over 50 languages. His spiritual idealism is closely linked to the myth of the Balkans as the heart of Europe. Since 1988 he has lived in Paris. He was Ambassador of the Republic of Macedonia to France, Spain, Portugal and UNESCO. His plays R, The Fall of Albert Camus and Happiness is a New Idea in Europe received international recognition throughout Europe and the United States. His play The Eternal House will be featured in 2021 at the Macedonian National Theater in Skopje under the leadership of American experimental theater director Robert Wilson.