Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.
Margaree Little’s translations from the Russian of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam have appeared in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail), and The Michigan Quarterly Review. Her first poetry collection, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, the Camargo Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others.
