Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of five collections of short stories and three novels; in 2003 he was awarded Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in Iowa Review, Guernica, PEN America, Electric Literature, World Literature Today, and elsewhere; two of his collections have appeared in English: Blue Has No South (Clockroot Books, 2010) and Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot Books, 2011). For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings, his new collection of micro fiction, was published in Hebrew in 2012.
Becka Mara McKay teaches translation and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she also received a PhD in comparative literature. Her first book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. She has published three translations of fiction from the Hebrew: Laundry (Autumn Hill Books, 2008), Blue Has No South (Clockroot, 2010), and Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot, 2011). Her translation of the poetry of Shimon Adaf will be published in 2013. She has received awards and grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the American Literary Translators Association, and a Witter Byner Poetry Translation Residency. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, ACM, Third Coast, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Rhino, Natural Bridge, Rattapallax, and elsewhere.