VLADIMIR LEVCHEV is a Bulgarian poet and writer whose parents are a poet and an artist. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, in 1982, and from the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, in 1996. Levchev’s magazine Glas (“Voice” or “Vote”), was the first independent periodical in Communist Bulgaria, and it was banned by the authorities before the downfall of the regime on November 10, 1989. It featured some of the best known Bulgarian and Eastern European dissidents. Levchev received a Fulbright scholarship in 1994. He resided and worked as a language instructor and a professor of literature in the United States for 13 years. Since 2007, he has been teaching literature and writing at the American University in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has written fifteen books of poetry, two books of essays, and two novels published in Bulgaria. He has had three books of poetry, Leaves from the Dry Tree, Black Book of the Endangered Species, and The Rainbow Mason, published in the United States. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago, Child of Europe: Anthology of New East European Poetry, The Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1997), and Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets. His poems have been translated for literary magazines in Russian, German, French, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Punjabi, and Hebrew. He is the translator of Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, and other American poets in Bulgarian. Levchev graduated from American University (Washington, DC) and currently teaches at the American University (Sofia, Bulgaria).