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Jay Rogoff has published six books of poems, including The Long Fault, The Art of Gravity, Venera, and most recently Enamel Eyes, A Fantasia on Paris, 1870. He has recently completed a volume of new and selected poems, called Loving in Truth. He also writes dance criticism regularly for the Hopkins Review and Ballet Review. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

 

 

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow into an aristocratic family on June 6, 1799. He is often considered Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His first major work was the poem Ruslan and Ludmila. His political verses associated him with the Decembrist revolt, causing him to be banished. He worked on Boris Godunov and the novel in verse Eugene Onegin before Nicholas I allowed him to return to Moscow in 1826. Pushkin died at age 37 following a duel with a French officer who was paying unscrupulous attention to his wife.

 

 

Heinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Germany in either 1797 or 1799. In 1831 he took exile in France, where he often struggled financially despite irregular patronage from a millionaire uncle. With freedom of speech he developed an international reputation for the lyricism, wordplay, irony, and excoriating satire of his poems, and was called the last of the Romantics. In 1841 he married Crescence Eugénie Mirat (“Mathilde”), who cared for him during eight years of paralysis; he wrote from bed until his death in 1856.

 

Chris Fahrenthold teaches English at Fontbonne University, having served artist residencies at both the Green Center and Paul Artspace. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College, as well as a law degree he never used. His poems have appeared here and there, and he lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and French Bulldog.