Irina Mashinski was born and raised in Moscow.  She graduated from Moscow University, where she studied physical geography and theory of landscape and had completed her PhD in paleoclimatology.  She then worked in various jobs outside of her profession until she emigrated to the United States in 1991 with her husband and daughter. In the U.S., she taught mathematics at high school and Russian culture and history at several universities. She is the author of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian and the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of the Cardinal Points Journal (Brown University).  She has translated poems by Robert Creeley, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others into Russian. Irina Mashinski is the recipient of several Russian literary awards, and, with Boris Dralyuk, of the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize.