My initial foray into translating was at Bard College, where I was given a copy of Osip Emilievich Mandel'stam's writings in Russian, and decided to translate his second book, Tristia (1922) for my senior project. A few years later, I was asked by the editor and publisher of Ardis, Carl Proffer, to contribute an updated version of that text for a major anthology, The Silver Age of Russian Culture. In 1987, a bilingual edition of Tristia, containing a facsimile of the original text, was published by Station Hill Press. That edition was nominated by Library Journal for the list of "Best Books 1987."

I moved to Moscow, Russia for two years in 1996, where I was Director of Telecommunications Projects for IREX, under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. During that time, I continued to translate poetry, and in fact gave a joint reading at Shakespeare & Co. bookstore with noted Russian conceptualist poet, the late Lev Rubinstein. Poems of mine in English were translated into Russian and published in GLAS, and later the anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Современная американская поэзия) (1996). In 2000, a novel I had written in Russian, "Hot War: Memoirs of an American Vampire in Moscow" (Горячая война: Мемуары американского вампира в Москве) was excerpted in the literary journal out of St. Petersburg, Commentaries (Комментарии). That same year, my translations of Aleksei Kruchenykh's long poem "From Sahara to America" and a poem from Osip Mandel'stam's Tristia were included in the enormous anthology of avant-garde writing, Poems for the Millennium.

In more recent times, as a freelance translator, I have focused on technical translation and editing in English from Bulgarian and Russian, mostly in the area of biomedicine and pharmaceuticals. Also, as a contractor for 16 years in the so-called Intelligence Community, I translated for the Defense Intelligence Agency a book on the history of Soviet Chemical Corps, and a chapter of a book on the KGB.

As to my academic credentials, I have a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Bard College, MA in Russian Language and Literature from the University at Albany (NY), and a PhD in Slavic Folklore and Linguistics from University of Virginia. I am a member in good standing of the American Translator's Association.